Shying Away
by A. Shieldmaid
Summary: Jayne makes a new friend. Or something. Rated for cussin, sexin, violence. Chapters 1-5 here now.
1. Shying Away Chapter 1

**Shying Away; Part One**

It happened on an edge-world moon named Govanne in a port town called "Commonwealth" though even the half-blind could see after one quick look that Commonwealth consisted of a whole lot of common and a distinct lack of wealth.

Not that a one of them complained much. After all, it didn't happen often that Mal's crew had two whole nights to themselves on solid dirt and some decent cash-in-hand, and even this shitty rough little docking town was a better place to spend both than an unbroken long-run in The Black.

So it was that on the grimiest side of a town plenty grimy to begin with, Jayne finally found a tavern offering a local version of whiskey that didn't taste entirely like a chamberpot figured prominently in its distilling process. Jayne then proceeded to sit down at the bar and drink rather a lot of it.

The whole tavern was crowded full of people but--wouldn't it just figure--most of 'em were men and those that weren't men were attached to one; the discovery certainly put a dent in Jayne's plans for the evening. Still, he noticed how most of both were giving wide berth to a little table in the far corner, and when he looked closer that way to see why, his eyes settled on the one person of female persuasion in the entire establishment who was not attached to a man.

Unless Jayne counted the guy she was arm-wrestling at the moment.

She was long and lean, on the hard side of skinny, a woman of the sort Jayne was usually more concerned about breaking outright than getting good and rolling-sweaty with. But her face was nothing she needed to apologize for, she had all her teeth (she smiled wide as she slammed her opponent's hand down hard on the table) and her little strappy dress, though raggedy and some washed-out memory of a color that maybe hadn't started out so grey as it ended up, displayed a whole lot of skin patterned with intriguing tattoos. And her hair… Her hair was downright startling, the color of fresh blood flooding all the way down to her ass. Jayne decided she might be worth a watch or two.

So he watched her arm-wrestle a steady little parade of wharf-jockeys and boatmen, long enough to figure out the nature of her game. She wrestled men who seemed one of two things: soft, or drunk as judges. Didn't mean she wasn't beating them fair, though--Jayne watched her wrestle either-handed, watched the ropes and cables her muscles made jumping beneath her painted, patterned skin. By the time he'd watched her not just win a tidy heap of take for herself but also slam a blade drawn from seeming thin air right through the hand of a guy trying to steal some of it, Jayne had seen enough to be powerfully interested.

Before too long, though, watching her, just _watching_, got to being as dull as a pig's ass. It always does.

While Jayne was never sure exactly why, he was sure enough aware how often being bored and drunk walked hand-in-hand with his being in some kind of trouble. And Mal had told him, last thing before Jayne disembarked Serenity, that if Jayne ended up in some backwater gaol-cell in these next couple days Mal would leave him there. Pretty sure he didn't want to find out the hard way whether Mal'd been kidding or not, Jayne considered his options, such as they were--muscling his way into the pool table, a spoke-for woman's attentions, or a bar fight--and decided not a one of them was particularly enticing. Not this early on, anyway.

So Jayne rose from his barstool and muscled his way over to the corner table instead.

There was already a guy seated opposite the tattooed woman, but he was so drunk he didn't holler much when Jayne grabbed a shoulder and shoved him bodily out of the chair. The drunk guy staggered off his ass to his feet with an ugly look on his slack face, but after a good eyeful of the man they call Jayne he turned and slalomed his way back towards the bar instead. Jayne dropped into the vacant seat.

The woman looked him over in a way that made Jayne feel like she was weighing him out on a set of those jewelers' scales that measure all the way down to ridiculous trace bits of nonsense, and then she said matter-of-factly, "Move on, pirate; I won't wager with you--you're too damn big. You're like to break my arm and I can't afford that."

Now, Jayne was pleasantly drunk, a rare enough state and one certain to rapidly deteriorate if he had to get back up out of this chair again and find something else to do in this shithouse or another one just like it, so he pulled out a few coins and tossed 'em on the tabletop. "No wagering, then; you win either gorram way. I won't break nothing."

She counted the coins he'd thrown her with one hand as the other one disappeared beneath the table; Jayne bet himself there was almost certainly a gun in that other hand now, and that it was likely aimed, right this moment, at some part of himself that he was mightily attached to in an unshot condition. "Give me another seventeen, then," she demanded.

Now that was some damn spendy wrestling, the way he saw it, even if she was the only painted redheaded arm-wrestling woman on this heap-of-gos se world. "What? _Why?_" Jayne leaned back in his chair, let her see his own gun hand was under the table too, now. He could put a hole through her and her chair and at least two of the guys between the exit wound and the pool table from this range with what he was packing, so what did it hurt to warn her?

The woman glanced around her, and then leaned forward to explain, "I'm twenty under quota tonight, you already gave me three, and none of these hwundans'll come near me now, what with you sitting here like you bought me outright anyhow. So you'd better pony up the difference and make it official."

Jayne considered that a moment and got it. Suddenly the night grew a little brighter. "You're a whore?" Talk about good fortune. An arm-wrestling whore. With a gun and a smart mouth, at that.

She nodded, even though she was saying, "No. I just find the company in this bedpan stimulating as all manners of hell." Then she eyed him hard through eyes a shade of green as strong and startling as the color of her hair. "I make quota otherwise, when I can. Gustin don't care how, long as he gets his. But none of it's an option now with you sitting here bold as sunrise. So pay up, pirate, or get gone." She leaned farther forward, offering him a view of some astonishing cleavage even as, beneath the table, Jayne felt something hard and cold tap his knee twice; it could only be the muzzle of that gun he'd just known was there in that other hand. "Or you'll take a bullet. Nothing personal, understand, but a woman's got to eat and these barge-skinners have to know I mean business."

"I don't pay for nothing I don't get," Jayne told her. He leaned forward himself, tapped her on the knee with his own gun barrel. Just twice, just enough to return the favor and let her know he wasn't some stupid transport-layover yokel. "Sort of a personal…what-do-you-call…guideline, dong luh ma?"

The whore stiffened straight in her chair and swore at him. Then she looked at him with, unless Jayne had gone suddenly moonbrained, what looked like actual interest for the first time. Sighing heavily, she pushed a thick strand of shimmering hair out of her face where it'd fallen over an eye. "Fair enough. Give me the seventeen and if you want, I'll roll you." She looked like she was weighing him again, but the way her eyes seemed to catch on various parts of him it seemed like she was using a different kind of scale now. Smiling the tiniest bit, she shrugged and muttered, "Might as well be you as any of these pieces of shit. You look clean, anyhow."

Her shoulders were broad and bare beneath the little straps holding up her dress; when she shrugged, the colored pictures on her skin slid smoothly over the muscles moving beneath them. The sight drew Jayne to wondering, if he ran his fingers over those pictures right now, would they be soft or slick? Smooth or raised? Warm or cool? Then he remembered something important about what she'd said, and he blinked. "Roll me." Jayne repeated, cocked his head and narrowed his eyes to look at her unblinking. "Now, are you saying you're gonna try to get me drunk and rob me, or that we're gonna do some ruttin' around? 'Cause that first one, it just ain't--"

But she cut him off. "Give me that other seventeen and we'll see what happens." She grinned full at him and damned if she didn't wink, too. "By the look of you I'm guessing you can manage, either case."

Jayne considered that--to his figuring, twenty wasn't much for any wharf-town whore remotely worth the name. Might as well be this whore as any other. _Especially_ this one. Something about the way she grinned made him think he might regret passing her up, later on.

So he pulled out a few paper-cash bills, counted 'em twice, and tossed them onto the table between himself and the painted whore. "Gorram it, you better be good," he grumbled because he felt like he had to say something. But he didn't put any teeth into the remark.

And she must have caught his mood; instead of getting all huffy, she threw her head back so all that heavy red hair shifted and danced behind her like thick, dark fire, and she laughed. It was an unexpected sound, as wild and free and open as everything that's good about The Black and absolutely out of place here in this shitty little tavern in this shitty little town on this shitty little moon. Even though there wasn't any joke Jayne could put his finger on, the sound made him want to laugh along with her.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she chuckled finally, smiling right at him like she knew him, like they were friends who went way back and she was glad to see him again, "Right back at you, pirate. Right back at you."

****************

She said she had to wait around the tavern until Gustin came to collect--which should be pretty quick--and after, she'd take him out on the town for whatever Jayne wanted. That was okay with Jayne; he had a paid guarantee for how the evening would end, and a table by himself with the painted arm-wrestling whore until then. Once he'd hailed a passing barman to bring a bottle of whiskey and a couple shot glasses, life settled into being pretty damn good.

The whore wasn't at all unpleasant company; she matched Jayne shot for shot, and kept him conversating without asking him a bunch of stupid questions he didn't know how or want to answer, and once, when he'd said something she found amusing, she reached over to lay her right hand on his arm while she laughed. Jayne looked down at her hand against his skin, marveling at how small it looked there. Then his eyes found the landscape unfurling across her forearm with pale yellow flowers blooming on green hills, birds against a blue sky bordered by a forested tree line. The leaves of those trees were turned over silver by a breeze Jayne could almost feel; he could almost smell the green grasses tracking that breeze in gentle waves and swaying yellow blossoms. And then, because Jayne's eyes were sharp enough to hit a man in the neck at 500 yards with a bent scope, he saw, just barely visible against the curve of a hillside nearest her wrist, a tiny house with smoke curling from its chimney, seen from far, far away.

When he bent to look closer, the whore pulled her arm away as if his skin had suddenly burned her palm. "What's that?" Jayne nodded at the landscape.

She laughed, but to Jayne's ears it sounded false, tinny. "A trifle is all. Saw it in a capture once."

Jayne didn't think so, but whatever might have been said after that was interrupted by the arrival in the tavern of a group of men that made the whore's eyes narrow to splinters of cold bottle-glass when she saw them. "Gustin," she said, low, and gathered up the handful of coins and bills she'd counted out while they'd talked.

Jayne turned and sized them up, two guys (unremarkably filthy and low-dressed and hungry-looking as any other man in this town except for the super-sized firearms they wore on their hips) flanking a third--a tallish sort, dressed like a dandy, clean and built like a man who had enough money for food and enough time to work at staying strong--who walked in and looked about like he owned the place which, as far as Jayne knew or cared, maybe he did. Jayne pegged that one for Gustin, and decided by looking the guy was likely a right pissant of the sort that thought the 'verse revolved around him because he had a middling pretty face and a set of cold mean eyes. Jayne crossed his arms across his chest, leaned back in his chair so far the old ladder-back creaked dangerously, and noted how the crowd parted before the three sauntering up to the table he shared with the painted whore.

Ignoring Jayne entirely, the one he pegged as Gustin stopped beside the whore and smiled down at her. That smile, Jayne decided, was just about as out of place on that pretty-boy's face as a mustache was on a snake. Jayne modified his first impression--not only was the man surely a pissant, he was surely a dangerous pissant, too.

"How's my spotted bitch?" The pissant asked pleasantly, looking down at Jayne's whore.

Jayne saw a muscle jump once, twice in her cheek as she bit down on something--her tongue, the inside of her lip, an honest reply, maybe--but when she answered, her voice was level and pleasant right back at him. "I'm fine, Gustin."

Gustin ignored her. Instead, his eyes, so pale grey that they seemed entirely colorless, passed over the space she occupied until they found Jayne and came to rest there. As though commenting on Jayne's shirt or something, he said, "You hurt her, I'll see you dead."

Jayne stared back hard. "Didn't pay to _hurt_ her."

Gustin's eyes narrowed briefly at that, and then he turned back to the whore. "Ah. So you've found a gentleman, at last."

Even Jayne recognized the sarcasm dripping like slime from those words for what it was, but just in case he hadn't got the point the dandy settled his open coat over the piece slung on his hip. It was surely worth a magistrate's ransom what with the gold chasing and pearly grips and the fancy-tooled holster, but it was a small gun best suited for the short-range shooting of a man you already had the drop on and wanted to die impressed. And gorram it, it looked like a gaudy kid's toy.

Jayne drew a deep breath to make an appropriately gentlemanly observation about the unfortunate size of the dandy's hogleg, but before he could the whore jumped right in, offering Gustin the money she held. Gustin took it, counted it and made it disappear into a side pocket, then he turned briefly to the two men waiting on him to say with that snake-like smile again, "Sorry, boys; looks like you're on your own tonight."

The whore reddened and looked away. Gustin set a hand onto her right shoulder, tightened his grip until his knuckles whitened and his fingers bit deep into the long-tailed bird flying across her skin in dark shades of deep blues and greens. The whore stared straight ahead; her expression did not change; she did not blink. "Tomorrow, then," Gustin remarked finally and let go of her, wiping that hand on the front of his long coat.

"Tomorrow." The whore nodded but she did not look at him.

She didn't look at Jayne, either, once Gustin and his twin shadows moved away and faded into gone. If Jayne had been forced to describe the change in her he'd have said some of her lights went out, and for some reason he couldn't figure, it bothered him to see it. "You want me to shoot him?" As soon as he said it, he realized he wasn't joking after all. Especially when his eyes settled back on the place where the marks of Gustin's fingers lay hidden by the colors set into her skin.

It worked, regardless. Once she looked up all startled, her face refashioned itself into a lopsided grin that had only a touch of residual sadness in it. "'Course I do," she drawled, "But you paid for entertainment, not a fire-fight, and I owe you." She took a deep breath and shook her hair back behind her shoulders, like a dog shedding water, like she was shaking particles of Gustin right off her skin, and then fixed her green eyes on him. "So, pirate, what do you want to do first?"

Jayne looked around, considering. The tavern smelled like a dead drunk's armpit, and the only charm it held was leaving with him. Besides, not shooting Gustin had left him on the outer edge of a foul mood. He had the sudden desire to be outside, anyplace else, where he could see the open sky. Grabbing the rest of the bottle of whiskey, Jayne stood up. "Let's get out of this jung chi deh go-se dway."

Damned if her green eyes didn't catch some kind of fire, spark with the same free wildness that filled her laugh--her _real_ laugh. She hopped out of her chair and hooked her arm through Jayne's smart-as-you-please, as if they were going to a cotillion or an uptown stage-show, grinning like he'd just given her a sweetheart ring or something. "C'mon then. Let a girl show you a good time."

**************

The first place she took him to was a tall-card parlor where Jayne discovered she played viciously, taking his money along with everyone else's far more often than she lost her own, all without breaking a sweat or losing the good humor that was on her since they left the tavern. When the same people who greeted her friendly started grumbling when she won and it seemed ugliness might be in the brewing, she pocketed her winnings, took Jayne by the hand and pulled him laughing out of the parlor back into the night, her blood-colored hair unfurling behind them like a crimson wake.

The second place she took him to was an alehouse boasting a local spiced honeywine that tasted like candy made especially for big-gun-toting, sky-sailing men. It simmered deliciously like hard-burn in the belly, and was costly enough that it was a damned good thing she was such a fine tall-card player and buying, too.

They sat and drank at one of the outdoor tables set in front of the alehouse that sold the stuff, right out under the sky where the stars were visible and the night breeze stirring their hair was cool and didn't smell too much of garbage and gos se.

"So how'd you end up beholden to that piece of shit, anyhow?" At the bottom of his first glass Jayne discovered he was still nursing the not-shooting of the toy-gunned dandified pissant like it was a sore tooth.

"Gustin?"

When Jayne nodded, the whore leaned back to look at the stars like maybe the story was written among them someplace, leaned and looked for so long that Jayne began to wonder if maybe the honeywine had made her a whole lot drunk a whole lot fast, and he'd missed it somehow. But finally she sat forward again, shook her head; her hair whispered against her skin. "Oh, now, that's a long story and neither of us is drunk enough to sit through it." She looked down at her hands and then back up into his eyes, "Ask me something else."

The set of her jaw dared him to press the issue, which upon a different occasion Jayne might have done for fun just to see how far she'd fight him on the subject. But she'd treated him fair so far, and he was mightily looking forward to touching her at some point tonight.

Besides--and this Jayne would have rather taken a flesh wound than admit--he conjured he knew the story already, had heard a hundred-hundred like it before from the mouths of other whores and such. A young girl with a dead mama and a live step-daddy almost always figured into it, and the telling of it made most whores break down and cry no matter how much they'd had to drink or how well sexed up they'd been first.

Jayne'd already seen the painted whore take some hurt without flinching, and he sure enough remembered the warning tap-tap of her gun barrel on his knee. And he'd heard her laugh.

After that he didn't want to see her cry.

So he asked her something else. "How come you keep calling me 'pirate'?"

She cocked her head and appraised him through the thick lowered lashes of her narrowed eyes. "'Cause if you ain't one, I'm losing my touch."

Jayne considered that. _Boat, crime, unsavory company, running from the law... _Yeah. He supposed she did have the right of it. He shrugged. "Coulda just asked my name, you know."

It made her smile that old-friends smile at him again. "Sure--and you'd've lied right in my face." She took a drink and ran her tongue out to chase the sweetness from her lips before adding, "You didn't ask mine, either."

Jayne considered that and shrugged; she was right on both counts. "Okay then. I'm asking."

That seemed to surprise her some. She sat back in her chair and considered him from across the table curiously. "You paid--I'll answer to whatever you want."

"Ain't what I asked," Jayne reminded her, frowning now.

She looked like she might argue with him, which he figured might be fun in itself, but then she drank deep, eyeing him over the rim of her glass. When she set it down again she was smiling--though, Jayne thought, a little nervously. "Fine, then. My mama named me Shy. Ain't that the most ironic name a parent ever tacked on a child?" She chuckled. Then, "What do they call you?"

The fact she'd left him a back door out of the question wasn't lost on him. But it couldn't hurt to say it, way out here where she was the only one to hear. And he very much wanted to hear her say it later on, when things heated up. So he told her. "Jayne."

Her left eyebrow rose, arched, the only part of her that moved for a long string of moments. Finally she shook her head wonderingly. "I stand corrected."

Then, her green eyes glinting in the night, she offered her hand to him across the table. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Jayne. Still want to arm-wrestle?"

************

Of course Jayne won.

Every time.

Either-handed.

It could hardly be otherwise, given the difference in their sizes, and the fact that Jayne sure as hell wasn't about to_ let_ her win. But she was even stronger than he'd guessed, and she never gave up or in, not even when losing was forgone. And every time the back of her hand hit the table, she just laughed, "Best two of three," and "Best four of five."

Though it was damn fun, Jayne finally called a halt to it before he hurt her. "This is getting downright shameful, woman. I'm thinking you just want an excuse to hold my hand," he teased.

But his joke fell flat when she flipped her hair out of her eyes to meet his gaze square and grinning, her dancing eyes suddenly full of green flame. "Well, no shit." Her smile smoldered. She downed the rest of her honeywine without letting go of his hand. "Let's go home, pirate."

Jayne's blood caught fire, reading the verdict of that look, those words, and his world suddenly went hard and then painfully hard. "Damn straight." He drained his glass and they stood up together.

Without any other talk, Shy began to lead him through the night.

*************

They made it as far as an alley a few intersections past the honeywine alehouse before they pulled each other into the shadows like they'd planned it that way ahead of time. In the alley, the darkness narrowed and telescoped into hands and skin and rough breathing and the rustle of clothing opened or moved or dragged or torn out of the way.

Jayne finally kicked some potted plants from the closest narrow alley door-stoop with a crash, daring someone to come outside to take them to task. He would shoot them in the head, so help him, it was that simple and this was that necessary. He sat down there and she parted her long legs around him and then it was easy, silk sheathing steel, velvet clutching stone, and their breathing came harsh and fast and together and quick. Soon, so very soon, Shy the painted whore arched almost double between Jayne's hands, keening through her gritted teeth and Jayne's own pleasure turned into a long exclamation of bright stars echoed endlessly above him as he threw back his head to the sky, exhaling a long broken breath and a reverent cussword into all that spattered light.

After, Jayne closed his eyes, felt the breeze chill him where he'd sweated through his shirt, listened to his uneven breathing and hers. Shy leaned forward, rested against his chest, and without thinking about it, Jayne circled her shoulders with an arm. They just sat that way a while until she started to shiver in the cool breeze, until she raised her head and observed quietly, "Oh, I want you in a bed."

Who was he to argue? Jayne opened his eyes.

She climbed off him, straightened her dress.

He stood up, refastened what needed it so they wouldn't get nabbed for indecent exposure and when she held out her hand to him, Jayne took it in his.

The night felt young.

************

Her place was located nearby over a dicing parlor, up a rickety set of open leaning stairs against the back of the building, through a door keyed with three different locks, and not a whole lot bigger than his bunk aboard Serenity.

But there was a definitely a bed.

Lying in it, Jayne made her leave the lights on so he could see all of her naked. Shy undressed for him slowly, languidly turning so he could read all the shades of her skin. When she saw how hard looking at her made him, she began to dance, moving like a fan-dancer, a charmed snake, a wisp of bright smoke, until Jayne could bear no more of the space separating them and rasped, "Get over here, woman."

Then she was under him; then Jayne was deep-to-the-root in her; and they were both trembling from the good of it.

As the night unrolled, Jayne found her name even more ironic; she was almost as shameless between the sheets as Jayne himself. Hell, she nearly made him blush a time or two, wringing out of him with her mouth, her hands, her body, every drop of sweet, shuddering release he had in him.

And he gave as good as he got, reading the sounds Shy made like they were points on a star-chart. Jayne navigated them to take her to places that made her wail and bridge beneath him so hard she practically raised him off the bed.

At last Shy lie spent and quiet under him, tracing aimless shapes over the sweat-slick, scratched-up skin of his back with her fingertips, and Jayne lay on her drained dry in every shiny sense of the word he knew of, thinking this was maybe the best spent twenty he'd ever parted with. And just like that, sleep came to claim him whole; Jayne had barely enough time to move off of her and gather her close before sleep tumbled him under.

*************

When he opened his eyes again, it was to a sunbeam slanting across his face through a tear in the drapes over a window beside the bed. Jayne slammed his eyes shut again as turned his face away from the light, cursing, and became aware of three things all at once: He had one serious bitch-dog of a headache, he had to piss something ferocious and a hand that was not his own was skillfully working his wide-awake john thomas.

Except for the pounding in his head and the growing need to find a toilet, it was the best way to wake up, ever.

Jayne sighed heavily, caught that hand by the wrist it was attached to, held it still. After last night he knew without looking his fingers covered a bracelet of yellow roses right there on her skin.

"Gorram it, woman," he groaned appreciatively. Opening his eyes again, more slowly this time, Jayne turned his head--gently--to where Shy was lying on her side next to him, her head propped up on the hand not on Jayne, watching him with gleaming green eyes. "Hold that thought, dong ma? I gotta drain the snake something fierce."

Shy nodded, raised the hand that had put Jayne's man-flesh in such a conflicted state to point past the foot of the bed to a door in the far wall. "I'll be right here."

The walk across the room went just fine until Jayne turned back at the door to look at her.

Then the part of him which had begun to focus on the immediate task at hand was immediately supplanted by the effect of seeing her there--her uncommon hair mussed, her tattooed body all colors and long lines tangled in the rumpled covers of her bed, waiting for him to come back to her.

And in that back-looking moment, Jayne imagined all they could do to, and with, each other as soon as he'd stretched down with her again. And what they might get up to doing, after. And after that, even. They could go to a greasy spoon someplace for dinner, maybe. Or to a firing range, if there was one to be found in this dung hill town, to see what kind of hand she had with that gun she carried.

He imagined what she'd make of life in The Black.

He imagined knowing someone was watching his back the way Zoe watched Mal's, Wash's, and Jayne wondered what that might be like.

The answer came to him wearing her shape.

That's when it happened.

With a sudden blood-icing, ball-tightening surge of horror, Jayne realized she _mattered._

To him.

He hurried into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.

********************

By the time he came back out again, Jayne knew what he had to do.

Crossing the room again he kept his eyes on the carpet, the drapes, the far wall until he reached the bed and more importantly, the place he'd dropped his clothes last night. He sat on the edge of the bed and began to dress without looking at her.

The bed shifted under him as Shy moved; he pictured her sitting up, imagined the look she might be casting at his back right now, and he dressed faster.

It went quiet, so quiet that Jayne could hear a dog barking somewhere far off, and a little kid's voice telling it to shut up. He bent up to pull on his boots. The silence was suffocating him.

Shy broke it at last. "What--did you see a rat in there?" Beneath her bantering words there was tension; the fact that he heard it and knew it for what it was made him fumble his left bootlace into a snarly rutting knot.

Because he had to say something, Jayne told his boot, "Have to be someplace."

"Oh."

There were so many things in that single sound, that one word riddled with hope and hurt and a flat lack of surprise and a wealth of anger old and anger new-minted. Jayne heard them all and he knew what look would be on her face if he turned, and he knew if he saw it he'd be back in bed with her in no time and he might be saying things Jayne Cobb wasn't about to say to anyone, let alone some whore he'd paid to roll him for a night on solid terra, especially not _this_ whore with her painted skin and her ironical name. As he stood to go, he hoped she would just keep her mouth shut.

But she didn't. "I... Last night..." Whatever she had to say, Jayne already knew he didn't want to hear it. But he couldn't just walk; he just couldn't though he couldn't gorram say why. So he stood there.

"I have enough from playing tall-card last night." Shy told his back, and when Jayne didn't say anything, she went on, "Thought I'd give that to Gustin tonight. You know, if you were going to be around. We could..."

Possibilities went winging through Jayne's mind-eye at the thought of another night with her; he cursed that eye and promised to blind it first chance he got later, once he figured out exactly where it was.

Shy's voice died away to silence. Finally.

"I can't. Someone's waiting for me." Sure it was a bold-out lie, at least until tomorrow. But it wasn't like this was the first or worst lie he'd ever told, even if it sure as hell was shaping up to be one of the hardest. Jayne started walking.

This new silence was different, cold. Fingers of ice reached across the room, ran up his spine and, with his hand on the doorlatch, Jayne paused. And he looked back.

Shy was still in bed, but she was sitting up straight now, all stiff lines and sharp angles with her rigid back and her drawn-up knees, her bedcovers pulled high and tight around her. Her eyes had turned once again into shards of cold green glass. She was looking at the foot of her bed, not at Jayne, but he recognized the look, could practically see the hurt sinking into her like Gustin's fingers, burying itself beneath all those bright colors.

She did not flinch.

She did not blink.

Not until Jayne slammed the door behind him, anyway. But he couldn't have known that.

*****************

He spent the day drinking a lot of spiced rum at various places around the tavern-heavy part of town, watching Cortex feeds of gladiator games and pit fighting interspersed by commercials for products Jayne couldn't have named a minute after they'd played out. Even so, he appreciated with sincerity nigh unto reverence the efforts of the scanty-dressed models trying to sell whatever it was they were selling.

After liberal repeated applications of rum and a plateful of fried-something, his headache finally passed from him. That was a mercy, anyway.

As the day lengthened into afternoon and then late afternoon, a short, squabby woman took up the barstool next to him.

Jayne ignored her and kept drinking

Even so, despite her failed attempts to engage Jayne in any form of meaningful dialogue and after she'd thrown back a few suspiciously bright pink fizzing drinks, damned if that same woman didn't lean over and propose something quite unexpected.

Jayne listened carefully and considered--the part of him still resentful about how this morning turned out clamored for him to accept--her offer. But it featured the wall out behind the bar right there in daylit plain view of anyone walking past, and she had a wicked overbite and a pair of buckteeth she could have opened bottles with. That was all Jayne needed, Mal leaving him on this dump forever because he'd broken some gorram local blue law and got the skin scraped off his cod in the process.

Besides. He'd had enough of whore-related complications to last him clean through tomorrow.

Jayne declined.

When she swept away in dubious offended huffery, he bought another drink and a cigar to celebrate his own wisdom.

But as late afternoon ran on into night and shift changes brought in the haulers and the barge-skinners and the fuel-jockeys from the docks, Jayne found it harder and harder to keep the painted whore out of the corners of his mind. Looking at the faces of the men reflected in the mirrored back-bar, Jayne's mind kept asking him, "That one--you suppose he's done her? Did she smile did she scratch did she scream did she swallow did she get there? Did she _like_ it? " And "How about that one?" "That one?" "Him?"

Before long Jayne was ready to shoot the next one he imagined tangled up in the painted whore's long legs and astonishing red hair, and it was plainly time to go. He swallowed his last shot while rising to his feet, and was gone before the barkeep picked up the coins Jayne had left spinning on the bar.

Jayne found himself on the dark dank streets with a mind full of a powerful deep shade of ugly. Damn the painted whore, anyway. Who the hell did she think she was, whispering Jayne's name into his ear while he traced the pictures laid into her skin until she quivered? While they moved, fast, slow, up the slope of each astonishing edge and then over? When he held her close and eased at last into sleep without dreaming?

Who was she to do that, some painted whore whispering his name like she _meant_ it?

Jayne decided to find her and ask.

**************

He thought about it all the way back to the tavern he'd met her at last night--what he'd say when he saw her, how he was going to say it, what he'd do to the guy who'd paid her for the night if the dumbass got in Jayne's way until he'd had his say. But when he came close enough to read the gas-lit letters over the door naming "The Black Spot," the number of people pouring out of that door made much of it go clean out of his head.

Frowning, Jayne reached into the crowd and pulled out the first guy he latched onto. "There a fire?" Jayne asked that guy.

"You don't wanna go in there, mister," the guy warned him, shaking his head for emphasis. "Gustin's in there. Pissed."

That told Jayne everything he needed. He shoved the guy back into the stream of traffic and began forcing his way in against the tide.

It thinned out at the last; when Jayne finally stood inside the tavern, there was no one in it but for himself, Gustin's two thugs and Gustin, and Shy, the infuriating painted arm-wrestling whore. Not a one of them looked his way.

Gustin had his kid-toy pistol drawn and pointed at Shy's face and not two feet separated them both. No matter how foolish-gaudy that weapon looked, Jayne knew its bullet at near point-blank range would kill her deader than shit.

Shy knew it too. Jayne could see it in her eyes even though she stared unblinking, hard, cold, right into Gustin's colorless grey ones. Jayne could see the truth of it settle into the lines and planes of her face, her body: no amount of cheerful pictures and colored inks could hide the killing hurt that toy gun would deal her. And Jayne could see she was ready for that bullet, ready to take it standing, ready to stare Gustin down even as it blew out the back of her head.

Seeing it, knowing it for what it was, touched something in Jayne's belly to fire and it wasn't the rum he'd drunk. His hand found his weapon, began to ease it free. No sense moving sudden while he had the drop, not while she was under the pissant's gun like that.

"You don't tell me," Gustin was saying to her, soft and pleasant-like, as though they were having some civilized conversation, "I tell you. And I'm telling you the boys are powerful lonesome tonight."

"But I made your quota, Gustin. You took the money." Shy's voice was low but she couldn't hide the teeth in it.

Gustin's eyes narrowed to slits and he smiled at her before striking her hard to the floor with the butt of his gun. _Good. Now stay down, woman,_ Jayne thought, _stay down or you'll be in the way. _

But Shy hauled herself to her feet, spit a mouthful of froth as red as her hair onto the floor and squared her shoulders. She met Gustin's gaze again.

Moving fast as a snake, Gustin grabbed a handful of her hair at the back of her head and snatched her close, jamming the gun barrel into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. _Kao!_ Jayne cursed inwardly and eased his hand back off his weapon again.

"You do what I say you'll do," Gustin leaned close, close as a lover, to say softly, distinctly, into her ear, "Else I'll shove this thing up the only part of you that's worth a turd and pull the trigger until all the chambers are empty." His smile grew broader, "Hell. Maybe I'll even reload."

"Hey, now," Jayne didn't know the words were going to come out of his mouth until they did, but he wasn't sorry once they were said. "That ain't right."

Gustin lifted his head at the sound of Jayne's voice and then turned to glance that way. His smile grew wider with recognition. "If it ain't the gentleman. You come to save this bitch, gentleman? I gotta warn you, she's thinking she's a person today."

Jayne snorted. "Hell no. Just want another poke at her is all; she weren't half bad. I got money."

Gustin considered that, looking carefully at Shy's face the whole time; Jayne hoped she wouldn't flinch now. Finally Gustin asked, "How much money?"

Jayne reached slowly into his drinking-and-whoring-money pocket to pull out his wad of remaining bar cash, glanced at it. "Fifty-two." He tossed it over to one of Gustin's goons who caught and counted it and nodded to Gustin.

"Fifty-two, huh?" Gustin said nothing else for so long that Jayne's hand started easing back to his gun, but finally the dandy nodded. Okay, then."

He shoved Shy so hard to the floor she skidded all the way to Jayne's feet. "Take her."

She made as if to rise again, but Jayne snapped at her nasty as he knew how, "Stay down there!" He spared her a quick glance to see if she was hurt much, but she wasn't bleeding anyplace he could tell except a split swelling on her lip, so he turned his full attention back to matters at hand. Things could go south damn quick despite money changing hands. _Especially_ since money'd changed hands. Jayne knew that song by heart, all right, having called the tune himself a time or fifty.

But Gustin was well on his way to the door with his thugs when Jayne looked again. He paused halfway there to turn his pretty-boy face back to Jayne. "If she gets sharp with you," he drawled, "Teach her some manners. Use a knife." And then he was gone.

Jayne didn't move for a long moment and neither did Shy. Not until people started to trickle back in off the street. Then he looked down at her. "You can get up now."

Rising slowly, Shy smoothed her hair with shaking hands. But once she was on her feet, she turned and threw a right hook directly at Jayne's head so fast he barely dodged it in time and so hard he heard the air move as her fist passed his face.

"What the gorram hell is that for?" Jayne demanded, thinking maybe he should just shoot her himself and be done with this whole troublesome mess, she was so damned confounding.

"Ni zhao si ma?" Shy's voice rose, shaking with fury and, Jayne allowed, likely a fair amount of adrenalin being she'd just spent some time staring down her own death and all, " Do you know how close you were to getting your ass shot off?"

Grabbing her upper arm before she could swing at him again, he steered her to an empty table; people were staring at them. "'Course I know--it's my ass, ain't it? Now sit down and keep your voice courteous." Jayne spoke low, put warning into every single word. "Try hitting me again, I'll knock you out and leave you here lying on your back."

Shy looked like she was calculating the threat, and him, coldly and carefully, but finally she threw herself down into a chair. "What did you come back here for?"

Jayne wasn't sure how to answer that question, especially since he was asking himself the same damn thing. The answer was tied up somewhere in a big nasty ball of unkind things he wanted to say to her alongside the sight of her facing down Gustin's gun and how gorram stupid-good it was to be this close to her again. He wasn't sure what needed to be said and what needed to be deep-space airlocked, so he said all he could--which was nothing at all.

After waiting a while with all her unhidden impatience there across from him in silence, Shy abruptly stood up, shaking her blood-red hair angrily until the ends snapped and crackled. Jayne's fingers twitched, remembered moving through those strands. "Gou huang tang. Thanks for saving me, pirate, but I have to..."

Jayne's hand around her wrist stopped her midsentence and midstep. "Who says I saved you?"

Shy stared at him like he'd turned purple or something and then her eyes got wide, then narrow. "Oh, hell no."

It was as good a time as any; Jayne rose to his feet, still hanging onto her wrist. "Damn straight--I paid for you square. And that pencil-dick go tsao de hwundan don't strike me as the refunding type, so let's go."

He could hear her swearing at him all the way as he pushed his way through the crowd and out of the tavern, towing her along behind him by the wrist, but she did it quietly and didn't try to shoot, stab or hit him so he didn't feel a pressing need to do anything about it.

Retracing their steps from last night, Jayne pulled her along until they reached the dicing parlor and then behind it. Shoving her ahead of him up the rickety steps, he still held onto her arm just in case she decided to do something foolish like bolt inside and lock him out.

But she didn't.

No, it was much worse than that.

*********************

Shy let him into her place without speaking, without looking at him; once she'd locked the door behind them, Jayne finally let go of her. Pointedly avoiding him, she sat down in one of the splintered, mismatched chairs at her small table--a stubby plank resting across two stacks of crating--and turned her back on him.

And then she covered her face with her hands and wept, her blood-colored hair falling down around her face, over her hitching shoulders, like a curtain, like a shroud.

Jayne stood horrified and uncertain a long while, finding he wanted very much to get the hell out of there and as far away from her as he could, after all. Instead of taking him back to the door, though, his feet took him to her other chair and since he was there anyway, Jayne sat down in it.

He raised an uneasy, reluctant hand and then let it fall back to rest on his leg. Swearing silently at himself Jayne gritted his teeth, raised that hand again to slide it beneath the cool fall of her hair and rest on her closest shoulder. When he found himself marveling all over again how something as unyielding as her shoulder-muscles beneath his fingers could be covered in something as soft as her skin, Jayne called himself a very bad man but forced himself to leave his hand there anyway.

Turned out that was the right thing to do; it kept him from dragging his chair closer to hers and putting an arm around her--an urge that hit him sudden-like, every bit as powerful as getting up and walking away.

Mercifully, her tears didn't last long. Abruptly Shy sat straight, wiped her eyes and drew a deep long breath that shook a little. "You didn't need to see that." She looked at her hands. They were shaking a little, too.

"I wanted to shoot him, you know," Jayne told her, because it suddenly felt very important that she know, "A lot. Still do. Still _could_."

That made her glance up and smile, but it was a small, tight smile because of the spilt in her lip. "Me too."

She glanced at her shoulder and Jayne realized with a start his hand was still sitting there. He cleared his throat and crossed his arms across his chest instead. He had a lot to say to her and his hands on her weren't going to speed that process along any. "You're like to get your chance, then. The look on his face, I'd say you're in trouble once that fifty-two cash wears off."

A muscle twitched in Shy'd jaw and she swallowed once, twice. "Sure am. He'll give you tonight 'cause you paid and he fancies himself a businessman. But if I'm still around after that… Hell, pirate--he invited you to cut me up. That doesn't bode well." She made a slashing gesture with her hand that didn't need any translation and looked down at where her fingers began to worry a loose thread in her skirt. "It's my own fault, really."

"What'd you do--insult that candy-ass little gun of his?"

She fixed him with a look Jayne couldn't read. "No. I had fun last night. That's a mighty dangerous mistake for a woman in my line of work to make."

Jayne could see her point, he supposed; it was a rare whore indeed who had the druthers of liking her job, at least in his experience.

Then the words sank in, and then all the ways she might mean them. It set him back a little, what with all the things filling his head all day, and now night, long that circled and buzzed like a swarm of bees until he swatted them down again. There was stuff to do here.

"How good a shot are you?" He asked.

"Good, but it don't matter." She leaned forward in her chair, watching his face. "He can buy whatever he wants done."

"No," Jayne remembered the look of the dandy's smile, "He'll do the big hurting himself. A pissant like him wants to hurt you while you watch."

When she answered, her voice broke. "I know."

"The law of any use around here?" Jayne hadn't actually ever seen a place were the law was of any use, but it didn't hurt to ask. By the look on her face, it also couldn't hurt to change the subject.

That question made Shy laugh outright, but it was a harsh sound. "These parts, the law belongs to Gustin as much as I do."

Just like he'd figured. Jayne folded his arms behind his head and leaned back, thinking. Taking out Gustin and his goons would be simple--hell, Jayne could do that himself easy enough, given a little time to track them down--but it wouldn't help her in the long view, not really. Kill Gustin and Shy'd likely be hunted down soon afterwards, either by someone bent on settling the score, or whoever moved in to claim the vacant territory and didn't want to mess with sorting out leftovers. And this heap-of-gos se town--probably this whole rutting moon--sure didn't offer a wealth of places where a painted arm-wrestling whore could hide herself for long.

So Jayne shrugged and said what made the most sense. "I'm shipping out tomorrow. You should come with me."

To his very sincere astonishment, _now_ Shy flinched--just like he'd reached over and slapped her. Hard.

Her eyes iced over. "That's not funny, pirate."

"It ain't supposed to be. It's supposed get you safe." Jayne argued, frowning at her. "There's other places in the 'verse than this shit heap, y'know."

"That's what I hear," she said, dry as Mal, and then her voice changed into something heavy, earthbound. "What would I do?"

Jayne grinned. "Well, you could get off someplace you fancied and arm-wrestle yourself a right nice living, for starters."

Her eyes defrosted and she came close to laughing at that, so close Jayne almost slipped in, _Or maybe you could stay aboard Mal's boat, if you can shoot worth a damn and put up with your fair share of assholery._ All in all, it was a better life than some.

Mal could come to like her well enough despite his low favor for whoring, once he knew her; sure he could. Especially if she could shoot half as well and cool as she stared into the eye of that gun in her face.

And if not, well, Jayne would just worry about that later.

He mostly wanted to get this out before she said no, or worse, laughed at him. "They ain't a bad lot to travel with." He shrugged and added, "Mostly. I mean, there's a crazy girl and a tight-ass doc and all. But otherwise."

Her eyes were wide on him, wide and dark. "And you?"

Jayne felt those bees starting to buzz again. "Guess I'm one of the bad ones." She smiled at that, a close-to-her-real-smile, and the bees buzzed harder, closer. "But I... I could watch out for you, I guess. If you wanted." Suddenly he couldn't look at her, didn't want to see how she might be looking back at him.

But then he couldn't stand it any longer; Jayne shot her a quick glance and damned if it didn't just happen to him again.

Jayne's eyes took in all of her at once, saw her sitting slumped on that piece-of-gos se chair at this poor-ass excuse for a table, balancing her fear with her hope, in a threadbare skirt and faded sleeveless Blue Star Cola shirt from six ad campaigns back. And he saw how none of it could take hold of the colors she'd had set into her skin; colors that took and hid the ugly that touched it, hid it all. Up till now, anyway.

It scared him too much to name, how easily he saw her aboard Serenity, standing in the galley, moving through the walkways, sitting at the table, lying in his bunk. But if seeing her there was so damn easy, how could it be a bad thing?

Jayne felt something move in his chest and he was ready to rise and take the quickest exit out even if he had to make it himself. But he told himself sternly this wasn't a gorram bullet, this wasn't a rutting blade, so it wasn't going to kill him, just suck it up and grow a pair; stay put and see what happened.

When he thought he might be able to make some halfway manly-sounding sound, he shrugged and said only, "Up to you."

Shy turned her eyes up him and drew a deep, deep breath. "I'm in." She reached for and found his hand.

Jayne felt her fingers shaking in his so he squeezed them a little.

She smiled for real now, shifting her grip in his hand. "So, pirate. What say--best nine of ten?"

"Did you pay that pissant to arm-wrestle me all night?" Jayne grinned.

But her face went sober again. "Mostly I paid to not arm-wrestle anyone else." Dark shadows moved in her eyes. "What did you pay for, Jayne?"

It was just too big a question to answer all at one time, full of bees and Shy with barge-skinners and fuel-jockeys, a question threaded through with the unlikely color of her hair, a question founded in the stories hard and soft painted on her skin.

So Jayne shrugged and told her the truth he had a handle on, "I wanted to see you got your money's worth is all."

That made her smile her old-friends smile again and Jayne truthfully hadn't been aware how he liked it so much until he saw it back there on her face. "So come over here," his voice--when did it get so thick? So gruff? "And let's just see about that."

Then he was drawing her close and then his hands were caught up in her wild hair and whatever remained awkward and hesitant between them quickly ignited into something as hungry and demanding as the fire coursing through Jayne's veins.

The rest of the night passed kindly for them, measured by Jayne's hands wrapped up in the red tide of Shy's hair while she knelt between his thighs making his breath hitch and catch. Measured by the ways Shy twisted and danced for him again, but on the point of Jayne's tongue this time. Measured by her arms around his neck, his hips between her legs, his name in her mouth. Measured by the sight, feel and taste of her above and beneath and before him, all slick satin and tight velvet and bright smoldering colors.

The night passed them measured by means other than the inexorable, irrevocable approach of morning, and that was kindest of all.

*******************************


	2. Shying Away Chapter 2

**Shying Away--Part Two**

Jayne woke slowly, all tangled up with the woman sleeping against him. Remembering why made him grin even before he opened his eyes to see her there, head on his outstretched arm and her uncommon blood-colored hair spilling over them both. Yawning, Jayne carefully extricated his legs from hers so he could stretch the beginning of a cramp out of his left calf.

"Smells like sex in here," he noted with satisfaction.

Beside him, Shy stirred, smiled sleepily, "Go figure." She turned her head to kiss his shoulder.

Jayne considered the morning remaining to them before they had to head back to Serenity. "Know what I like?"

She didn't miss a beat.

"This." Shy moved her hand languidly down, down, until it came to rest in a place where it got up to some very good no-good.

"Well, yeah," he agreed after a moment of breath-hitching reflection, "But _besides_ that."

He figured he'd better finish saying what was on his mind before it went right out of his head. "A hot bath," he said. "That's what I like." Jayne contemplated the low stained and peeling ceiling, running the fingers of one hand through her long red hair idly. "Don't get much chance for a good long soak, out in The Black."

Shy stopped what she was doing and raised her head to look at him. Whatever she saw in him looking back at her made her smile, and she sat up. "All right, you've got it, pirate. Put your clothes on."

But Jayne pulled her back down beside him instead; his arm just fit so damn well around her waist, her bright patterned skin moving smooth as silk against his own. "How 'bout not just yet?"

She didn't resist; in fact, Shy's smile became wicked and her eyes gleaming greenly through the tousled strands of her hair as she fitted herself to him close as a second shadow, saying, "Shiny."

Then Jayne forgot most everything else but mapping out her skin with his hands and where that led.

*******************

Later on, once they got upright and dressed, Shy took him two doors down from the dicing parlor to a public bath house, one that rented by the quarter-hour, all day and all night--the kind Jayne would have expected to find near a dicing parlor. They paid for an hour up front.

As soon as the attendants fired up the water heater in their bath closet, Jayne and Shy locked the door and made good use of it, getting up to all manner of slippery devilry until in the last fifteen minutes left to them, they rushed to drain and refill the tub to wash and oil their skins.

After that, all shiny-clean and smelling like uptown, they looked for a place to eat because Jayne realized at some point between lather, rinse and repeat just what his granddaddy must have been talking about every time the old man cackled he was hollow as a bitch wolf. No small wonder, seeing as how Jayne hadn't eaten a damn thing in the last day and a half except that plate of fried something tasting faintly of turpentine and onions.

They found the kind of greasy spoon Jayne had been thinking of yesterday, found it on the edge of the tavern part of time. The coffee there didn't suck much at all and wherever, _what_ever, the eggs had come from, the hash-slinger frying them made them taste pretty gorram good.

And Jayne was powerfully relieved to find out Shy ate proper-like--none of that pretending she wasn't really hungry or eating without using her fingers or any of that girl-foolishness that made it such a gorram trial to eat a meal at the same table with a woman. In fact, with that sudden frightening jump in his chest again, Jayne realized he could probably get used to this, even.

While they ate, Jayne finally got a good look at what Shy carried: A .32, a solid well-made revolver. It was nothing to apologize for carrying, that's for sure, even if the ammo was harder to come by than some. Hell, a .32'd slice a hole through muscle and bone cleaner and faster than government work, sure enough. When she offered the gun to him across the table for a closer look, no one even glanced up from their plates; Jayne figured he might even get used to this place.

On close inspection, Jayne found the .32 clean as a whistle and smelling of that fine blend of blued steel and gun oil. That, and the sight of how well the bird's-head grips fit her long-fingered hand when he handed it back to her, how easily she slid the weapon over her painted skin and back into her waistband, had him half ready to sweep their plates and cups to the floor and jump her right there on the gorram table top. Few things Jayne knew of in the 'verse were sexier than a woman who knew how to care for and handle her piece. The only way it could get sexier would be if he could watch her blow stuff away with it naked.

And when he described Vera to her, the set of Shy's lips, the catch in her breath, told Jayne she was right there with him.

Gorram it, sometimes life was just that good.

At last he shoved his plate away and pushed his chair back from the table so he could lean back in it while finishing his coffee. "So you got anything you wanna take with you?"

Shy looked down into her own cup for a moment. Jayne thought maybe there was a dead fly in there or something until she looked back up at him and shook her head with a harsh laugh that sounded like it tasted bad in her mouth. "Not a damn thing but a few clothes."

Jayne checked the grease-darkened chron hanging behind the lunch counter, figuring. "We better go get 'em, then." Where the hell did a good morning like this get to so fast, anyway?

Shy's eyes darkened, and she frowned into her cup again. "Last chance to change your mind, pirate. I won't hold you to last night if you woke with a change of heart."

"Aw, bizui." Jayne took one last swallow and frowned at her over the thick rim of his mug. "That's just crazy talk." He set the cup down again and waved a hand at her plate. "Finish up and let's haul ass. Mal won't wait."

Shy smiled at him, her free, light smile and Jayne smiled back. Then they rose, paid their check and left.

***********************

When they hit the alley and neared the stairs up to Shy's place, that's when Gustin and his goons fell on them. And even as Gustin cracked Jayne in the head with the butt of his gun twice, even as Jayne felt himself hitting the dirt, even as he watched Shy draw and get off three fast shots at the dandy pissant before the two goons clubbed her senseless, even as the world went black around him and closed up on the sight of Gustin's goons dragging her body away down the alley, Jayne wondered exactly how the hell he hadn't seen it coming.

***********************

He woke up with a mouthful of dirt and a headache that made every hangover he'd ever had seem like a stroll through a village fair with a pretty girl on his arm. Squinting into the brightness, Jayne found the position of the sun and considered. He hadn't been out all that long.

There might still be time.

It was easy enough to track them; they'd made no attempt to hide their goings. Probably counted on him being dead, or at least out a lot longer, and that was good. His ma always did say Jayne had a hard head.

The track-signs led him right to where they were, all four of them boxed into a blind alley behind and between some buildings in the rough warehouse district bordering the wharfs; that was good too. Serenity wasn't far away, due east of here.

But once he got close enough Jayne could see he hadn't found them fast enough to keep them from doing to Shy whatever they'd had time to do. The bruises and blood on her face, around her throat, her shoulders, running down her legs, told him that plain as she hung by her arms between the two goons who held her swaying on her knees in front of Gustin.

One of the shots she got off before they took her must have hit the dandy pissant hwundan after all; he was bleeding hard out of his shoulder, and his fancy shirt and slacks were ruined for sure. That made Jayne smile.

Gustin didn't look as pleased about it as Jayne was, though. His hair fell down lank over his sweaty forehead and stuck there, and Gustin's teeth were bared in a grin made as much of pain as triumph as he snatched Shy's head up with a handful of her hair and held his little candy-ass gun just inches from Shy's temple.

Jayne knew then that he was walking up on an execution fixing to happen, sure as if there'd been a gallows and a rope with a noose in it sitting there.

And he knew it meant Shy wasn't dead yet.

Jayne drew steel easy as breathing, easy as scratching an itch, and Gustin's gun hand exploded in a mighty gratifying cloud of misty, chunky red through which his fancy little pistol cartwheeled away. His two goons died fumbling their own weapons and looking damned surprised before Gustin hit the ground moaning.

Shy fell facedown into the mud their blood made of the dirt, her hair spread around her head like a large-caliber spatter pattern.

Taking those last few long steps, Jayne finally crouched beside her. When he touched her cheek to turn her face out of the gory muck before she choked on it, his fingers came away wet with thick red. "Ta ma de, woman," he muttered under his breath.

Now, things might have ended differently if Gustin hadn't heard him, hadn't raised his head to scream at Jayne, "Jien ta-duh guay--what's wrong with you? She's a rutting whore! A _hole_, is all! Just a gorram ho--"

Things might have ended differently, but Gustin _did_ hear him, and he _did_ raise his head, and he _did_ scream it; so Jayne shot out his throat and watched Gustin die choking, thinking how it was surely a faster death than the rat-bastard deserved. It was nothing new to Jayne, this killing fast and sure and true, and that's a fact.

His gun was made for it.

Reholstering his weapon, he checked the position of the thin, watery sun again. Not much time left. Looking around carefully, Jayne found what he was looking for. Leaning over one of the dead goons, Jayne tore off his long wool coat and turned back to Shy. Raising her carefully, he wrapped Shy in it, took her up in his arms, and stood, his head pounding something ferocious but oddly feeling a lot better, now.

********************

Mal was waiting on him, standing right there inside the bay doorway.

By the look on his face Jayne could tell he was late, and that Mal had his ass-hairs in a twist and was damned close to making good on his promise. The captain took a step onto the boarding ramp and opened his mouth to say something Jayne bet would have matched his face, but then Mal's eyes fell upon what Jayne carried and his expression changed.

"What did you do, Jayne?" Mal asked him, low and dangerous, his eyes dark.

Jayne didn't have time to talk; as he neared Mal, he swerved to go around him.

But Mal stepped in front of Jayne, hand on the butt of his gun. "You've got exactly one-half minute to tell me why you brought a dead woman to my boat, or I'm kicking your ass right back down the gangway and weighing anchor."

"She needs the doc." Jayne could feel Shy's blood soaking through the thick wool of the coat he'd wrapped her in. "He back yet?"

Mal didn't move, blink, or change expression. "What--you buy yourself a fixer-upper on the slave market, or just club some girl that caught your fancy? Fifteen seconds, Jayne."

Zoe stepped up behind Mal; when her eyes fell upon what Jayne carried, her eyes widened. "Ai ya," she breathed. Her eyes moved to Jayne himself and turned hard as flint as she dropped her hand to the butt of her gun, too.

Jayne sighed through his clenched teeth. "Gorram it, Mal, she's a whore. Or was. Or might still be--hell, I don't know. We didn't talk about that part." He shook his head to clear it, which made it pound worse. "But the pissant she was beholden to done this to her, him and his goons. Not me."

If anything, Mal's face grew harder. "And where are they now, Jayne--bringing a posse? What manner of trouble is following you?"

Her blood was running through his fingers now; he could feel it warm on his hands. Jayne took a deep breath. "I shot 'em dead in a blind alley, all three, about four sectors that way," he pointed over his left shoulder with his chin. "Ain't much left to make a posse with, and nobody paid me any mind coming here. Gorram it, Mal. she's gonna rutting bleed out, us standing here jawing about it. Can't you chew me a new one while the doc sees to her?"

Mal looked out the bay door a long moment at the dingy wharfs and the vessels docked around them, at the distinct lack of any sort of disturbance interrupting the dockmen and the few folks just passing by. Then he glanced down at Shy's bruised and bloody face, and his gaze went from there to the drops of thick red dripping from Jayne's hands onto the bay floor. Looking hard into Jayne's eyes, a muscle working in the captain's jaw, Mal finally called, "Wash, get us skyward. We're shoving off." Then, more quietly, "Zoe, go find the doc. Tell him we'll meet him in the infirmary ten minutes ago."

And then, even quieter still, "This ain't a done subject between us, Jayne."

"Yeah. Fine." Jayne stepped around him at last, his relief warring with urgency, and made fast for the infirmary as Mal hit the hot button and closed the bay door behind them.

*******************

Mal stood with Jayne and Shepherd Book--who'd shown up as if conjured or called by God, Himself--to hear the doc's verdict on Shy once he'd got a good look at her.

"She's been badly beaten," Simon was saying. Jayne snorted--he figured it didn't take medical training to see something that plain--and ignored the sharp look the doc shot at him before going on. "She has cracked and bruised ribs, a concussion and internal injuries to several vital organs, and she lost a lot of blood. Frankly, I've seen people die of shock from less, but with the transfusion from Kaylee, she's stable. When--if--she regains consciousness is currently the biggest issue." He smiled tightly but to Jayne it didn't look to have any real happiness in it at all. "I believe she was also...assaulted."

Mal's jaw clenched but the captain said nothing. Shepherd Book closed his eyes a moment and took a deep breath. Jayne frowned. "Well, no shit. She didn't get all messed up like that drinking sweet-sap whiskey on a gorram church-day picnic."

The look Mal shot him was dark; the one Simon shot him was incredulous. Finally Book said softly, "I think the doctor is telling us your friend was ra--"

"I know what he means," Jayne cut the shepherd off angrily. "Ain't no surprise, is all I'm saying. Not with those hwundans what had her. And shit's sake--she's a dockside whore. It ain't likely the first time." He shrugged. "She'll be all right."

Now they _all_ stood and gaped at him.

It pissed him off mightily. After all, which one of the four of them had spent the weekend either in her company or trying not to think about her? Which one had tracked and killed the hwundans that had done this to her? Which one had carried her here? He had the right of it, Jayne was sure.

"Shy ain't made of glass," he growled at them.

"'Shy'?" Mal shook his head. "What the hell kind of name is that for a whore?"

At least this time the doc and shepherd stared at _him._

But only for a moment. Then the doc went back to monitoring some machine he had Shy hooked up to and Book went back to sitting beside her bed. Praying for her, likely.

Jayne crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the doorframe again to wait a while more.

*********************

Jayne was in the cargo bay three whole gorram days later working on Mal's new mule when a tap on his arm made him kill his welding torch and turn. Kaylee was standing there beside him in a spare pair of goggles, her hair all mussed and she breathing heavy like she'd run all the way from someplace else. It all looked good on her.

"I'm here to fetch you to the infirmary right now, Jayne Cobb, if I have to drag you there by your short hairs."

Now that was a mighty intriguing prospect; Jayne considered it for a moment, raising his welding shield to look at her more closely.

Kaylee bounced on her feet, her face a study in impatience, waiting, and then she frowned. "Move yourself, Jayne--Simon commed and said they need you there right now."

There she had to go, bringing the damn doc into it and taking all the shiny out of his whole track of thought. Jayne sighed and set the torch aside, the moment over. "What foolishness are you talking, girl?"

"Your friend--she woke up." Kaylee's eyes were sober. "And she's taken after Shepherd Book. Best come before Captain shoots her."

But Jayne was past her and down the corridor before Kaylee turned all the way around to go with him.

************

He got to the infirmary door and had to skid to a stop to avoid running Mal down, who'd arrived at the same time as Jayne with his gun drawn and eyes blazing. "You stand her down, Jayne, or I will."

Jayne nodded and walked into the infirmary. What he saw made him stop short.

Shy was up and mighty spry looking for a woman who'd been bleeding her life away down the insides of his arms three damn days ago, and that made Jayne smile wide.

But she was backed into a corner and holding a scalpel--how had the gorram doc been fool enough to leave something like that lying around the gorram infirmary with sick people about?--and by the trapped-wild-animal look in her eyes, Jayne could see she was fixing to use it on Shepherd Book if he made any fast moves.

For his part, the preacher wisely had his hands up and open where she could see them, and was speaking to her low, calm as Book could, saying, "No one is going to cut you open, miss. I promise. Jayne is fine, and you are perfectly safe."

But Shy didn't seem to be buying a word of it. Jayne followed the sight of that gleaming bit of cutting hurt brandished in her unwavering hand to its inevitable conclusion, the one involving Mal--and probably Zoe, who'd just appeared beside Mal in the doorway gun in hand as well-- venting Shy full of very permanent holes.

Jayne wasn't having any of that. He crossed the infirmary on long strides.

"Hey, girl. You ain't dead," he greeted her, coming to stand next to Book in front of where she stood backed up against the wall.

Her face went dead pale when she saw him. Then her green eyes caught wild sudden fire, and she smiled that old-friends smile at him. Gorram it, when she did that it cut right down to the center of him slick as that scalpel.

Glancing at Shepherd Book, and then at the scalpel in her hand, Shy shrugged one colored, patterned shoulder--the one spattered with a galaxy of stars--and tossed the scalpel onto a tray full of other creepy-ass looking instruments. "I thought Gustin sold me to a parts dealer," she explained to Jayne, waving her hand to indicate the infirmary.

Made sense to him; he nodded. That'd be a sorry damn thing to wake up to, he figured--enough to put a weapon in any thinking person's hand.

She looked again at Shepherd Book. "Nothing personal, mister," she told him, "Just wasn't going without a fight is all."

Book lowered his hands warily, slowly, and cleared his throat. "No harm done." And then he stepped back. Way back. When Jayne glanced that way again, the shepherd was gone. The doc had wisely got himself to the other side of the room, as well.

Shy looked up at Jayne through the strands of hair that had fallen over her face. "I thought you were dead, pirate. I truly did."

"Well, I ain't." Gorram, it was good to see her standing again. Damn straight it was. He reached out a hand to brush that hair out of her eyes; it looked too much like blood there.

When Jayne could see her whole face, he could see written on it how scared she was.

She looked down, away, but every place her eyes came to rest made them wider, more scared-looking until they came back at last to rest on Jayne. "And here we are." Her smile trembled a little.

"Here we are," Jayne agreed.

The sound of the gun hammers easing back made them both look over to where Zoe and Mal were holstering their pieces.

"Yessir. We're all of us here." Mal noted, looking around him at Kaylee, Wash, Zoe, everyone who'd run to see the commotion. "That means work ain't getting done elsewhere, people." His eyebrows rose as he stared at them until with a few sighs and grumbles, they turned and drifted themselves away until it was only Mal, Jayne and Shy standing in the infirmary with the doc.

The captain turned to frown at Shy. "We have to have a talk, you and I. Now's as good a time."

The vibrant colors of Shy's hair and her skin were stark against the white gown she was wearing, the white walls of the infirmary. She looked like a woman-shaped pool of spilled paints, there, Jayne thought. A right fine-looking one.

"Captain Reynolds, with all due respect," Simon objected, "She should rest. There are tests--"

"I said a _talk_," Mal emphasized, and the tone of his voice left no doubt that he wouldn't be hearing any arguments, "Not a foot race." After a moment, Simon nodded and Jayne moved back to stand beside Shy who was watching them all warily.

"Now, then. I'm Captain Reynolds and I own the boat you've been on these last three days." Mal walked to the edge of the bed Shy'd been lying in until a little while ago, looked at her across it and tucked his thumbs behind his belt. "Jayne tells me you had a will and a need to be here. Is that the way of it?"

Shy glanced up at Jayne and then fixed her green eyes on Mal. "It is."

Mal considered her, and her answer, a long moment. "I don't mean unkindness, but I don't hold with couching words either so I'm asking you straight. What use to me is a whore on my ship, eating my food and breathing my air?" He leaned back, his dark eyes resting deep and unreadable on her.

Shy looked down at her hands, fingers twisted together in front of her. They were pale and shaking and Jayne had a sudden powerful urge to tell Mal to leave her the hell alone.

But he put his boot on the urge's neck hard--it just didn't seem to help things much, him aggravating Mal. It hadn't yet, anyhow. Besides, Jayne had seen Shy face down badder things than Mal, even Mal with his ass-hairs knotted like this.

And besides. In the deepest places in him, where all his mileage had collected itself, Jayne knew the hardest truth: If she couldn't, well, then nothing that happened from here on out mattered a jot anyhow because the 'verse would just eat her entire, first chance it got. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall.

Shy shrugged, finally. "I don't know. Don't know what else I'm good at." But then she raised her eyes to Mal's and added pointedly, "Yet."

Mal rocked back on his heels and looked at her for the longest time without saying a word. Then he shrugged and dug into a pocket. "Fair enough." Pulling out his hand, Mal flipped a silver coin onto the rumpled sheets of the bed between him and Shy.

Then he began to unbuckle his belt.

Even the doctor looked stunned. Simon opened his mouth, but no sound came out for a few moments until he was able to say, finally, "Jesus, captain. That's really... well... unconscionable. Unprecedented."

Jayne wasn't exactly clear on what the doctor had just said, but he sure enough felt that silver coin hit the sheets like a slap landing across Shy's face, and that woke something dark and bloody in him. He saw Mal see it, too, as Jayne stood away from the wall he'd been leaning on, ready to call Mal out and damn the consequences. But Jayne glanced back at Shy before he did and what he saw made him hold off on saying anything just yet.

Shy's eyes had turned to cold glass as they followed the arc of that coin; by the time the captain stopped messing with his belt buckle and moved his gaze to Shy instead, her eyes had gone to dark green ice.

Her shoulders came up square and straight; her chin rose as she stared Mal down unblinking, unflinching. Jayne knew the look, all right; he leaned back against the wall and grinned big.

"I'll arm-wrestle you for that coin, if you want." She finally spoke, and Jayne could hear the g_o hump yourself_ behind the words actually coming out of her mouth. "Or I'll play you a hand of tall-card. But that's all."

Mal blinked, and then the captain smiled a little, like she'd just answered some question he hadn't even asked her, and answered it right. Jayne was even more mystified when Mal turned to him and said, "Now you know," like Jayne was supposed to have some gorram idea what he was talking about.

Whatever the hell he meant, some of the hostile leaked out of the captain as he turned his head back toward Shy. Rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, Mal nodded. "That's good to know. But plain truth is, we got work to do on this boat and places to go, and you don't have a part in it--whoring or not."

Now Mal looked from Shy to Jayne and back. "Since we're near four days off Govanne on a long-run and I ain't of a mind for turning around and making it even longer, here you are anyhow."

Again, back and forth. Shy to Jayne. Jayne to Shy. And by the look of his face Jayne knew as sure as he knew how to find Vera's trigger blindfolded that Mal was making up his mind about something important.

"Well, hell," Mal spoke at last, "With you off the sick bed maybe I'll get some gorram use out of Jayne again. That's worth something, I conjure." Mal glanced at Jayne and then smiled a little at Shy. "Tell you what. You mind yourself and I'll consider you a passenger to our next port of call. Place called Strand--should be no more than two weeks out from here. Good a place as any to find out what else you're good at." Then his face grew grave, stern again. "You make me reconsider, though, and I'll set you down on the closest chunk of rock in our path and not lose a wink of sleep about leaving you there." He cut his eyes sideways at Jayne, adding, "And Jayne with you, if he bucks me about it."

Jayne frowned, objected, "Hey," but Mal paid him no mind at all.

"We clear?" The captain fixed Shy again with unblinking consideration.

Shy cocked her head like she wasn't sure she'd heard the words right, and then her eyes narrowed thoughtfully on Mal; Jayne recognized the looked, remembered being weighed out by it like a pile of fenced silver himself. Then she nodded at whatever she saw there. "Clear. Thank you."

"Good then." Mal turned away and called back over his shoulder. "Go for it, doc. Test away. And Jayne? Get her some quarters in the passenger bunks for when the doc clears her, and then haul your ass back to that welding rig. You've got half an hour." The last words drifted back down the corridor towards them since the captain was walking away that fast.

Shy's light touch on his arm startled Jayne out of his astonishment at what had just happened and how little he understood how it did. Shaking his head, he muttered, "Yeah. Sure, Mal. Half an hour." Then he turned to the doc. "What say, is she good to go?"

Simon looked back at him sternly and folded his arms. "No. She isn't. Not without the tests. She just woke out of a three-day coma, for the love of… " His voice trailed off and he shook his head. "And you have no idea what that means, so why am I bothering. Just go find her some quarters and go back to work; I'll run the scans and if they check out, she can go tonight, when you're done." He turned to Shy. "Is that all right with you?"

Shy nodded, but her eyes went to Jayne and stayed there, wide and dark and fearful again. Jayne frowned, and took a big guess at the cause.

Catching up her hand, Jayne told her, "Doc won't hurt you. Kept you from dying, didn't he?" But then he turned his head to look good and mean at Simon, adding, "Besides--he knows I'll rip his gorram lungs out if he does."

Simon rolled his eyes and shook his head again. "Good_bye_, Jayne."

Jayne grumbled, but he let go of Shy's hand and turned to go. He turned back at the door, though, and told her, "I'll be back. Don't go killing anyone while I'm gone, all right?"

She grinned at him a little, finally. "Sure thing, pirate."

As he walked away, Jayne could hear the doc saying, "Why do you call him... Oh, never mind."

Jayne smiled.

*************

By the time Mal called a halt to the gorram day, Jayne'd had enough a hundred times over. Today was different, and not just because he'd successfully resisted the urge to throw a wrench at Wash any of the times he wanted to real bad. Today was different because Shy was waiting for him in the infirmary. At day's end, Jayne set down his torch and shield, and was off to the shower closet so he didn't go see her all stinking.

"It ain't anything," Shy was saying to the doctor when Jayne got to the infirmary, "Just burns a little when I laugh."

The doc was helping her over to a chair despite her protests. "Come on and sit down."

"Hwundan kicked me. A lot." Shy frowned darkly. "I remember that much."

"He's dead now." Jayne grinned and walked over to her.

She stood right up again when she saw him, making Simon sigh and throw up his hands. "Fine. You're good to go, Shy. But go slow and take it easy." He looked at Jayne sternly while he said that last.

That reminded Jayne of something he'd been thinking about earlier. "Hey. What about, you know, sexy stuff'? Can we--"

The doc rubbed his face with a hand before fixing Jayne with a dark stare. "Every rib on her left side is either cracked or bruised, Jayne. Do the math."

"Math?" Jayne frowned. "When did gorram numbers enter into it? I just wanna know can we--"

"Shy," Simon interrupted, turning his back on Jayne entirely. "You should be careful of any strenuous..." he cast Jayne a quick dark look back over his shoulder, "Activity... for the next few days. If it hurts, don't do it. And if Jayne suggests it, it's probably a bad idea in general. Do you understand?"

Damned if Shy didn't wink at the doc. "I surely do, Doctor Tam. Thank you kindly for everything." She reached for and found Jayne's hand. "Let's go, pirate."

Hand in hand and both of them grinning like fools, Jayne and Shy left the infirmary.

*********************

"This here's your bunk." Jayne nodded at the door in front of them, and then slid it open for her; he'd seen her favoring her left side even though she tried to hide it from him. Waving her through, Jayne followed her and slid the door closed behind them.

Shy stood in the middle of the small room and looked around, her eyes wide. "Mine, huh?"

"Long as Mal lets you stay."

She stared around her at the shelves, the tiny closet, and at last her gaze fell on the narrow bunk, made up with some castoffs from Inara and the goofy pillow Kaylee'd brought over, all pink and stitched with butterflies. "This is..." Her eyes were huge. "Good."

Then she noticed the wad of sacking Jayne had left there on the bed for her. It was clean sacking, he'd made sure, and tied with a battered yellow ribbon he'd wheedled from Book for the price of cleaning the galley an extra turn next week.

"What's that?" Shy frowned the question at the rough bundle.

Jayne shrugged and sat down on the foot of the bunk. "Better check it out."

With a curious smile at him, Shy sat down and untied the ribbon. And when she unfolded the rough fabric and saw her .32 nestled inside, she drew a swift breath and said softly, "Ai ya. I thought it was gone for sure." Lifting it reverently, she turned it over and over in her hands, gazing upon it like it was some long lost friend of hers. Jayne supposed, strictly speaking, it was. "Where did you...?"

"In the dirt when I woke up in the alley. You dropped it when they grabbed you. Figured you'd want it back. You know, if you didn't die."

Shy's eyes glistened brightly, and she leaned to throw her arms around his neck. Hugging him ferociously, she whispered in his ear, "Thanks, pirate." When she let go of him, she wiped her eyes. Straightening, she made as if to set the sacking aside, and then frowned, felt it with her hand. Unwrapping it further, she saw what it held in its center and her eyes went wide with frank disbelief.

"Like it?" Jayne asked her, telling himself it really didn't matter near as much as it felt like it did.

"Holy bleeding shit, pirate," she whispered, and used a shaking hand to lift the small dandified pearl-gripped and gold-chased pistol from the folds of coarse weave. "How?"

Jayne shrugged. "Took it out of the mud. You can fence it most anyplace, if you want--a piece like that'll fetch enough to stake you somewhere. Or you could keep it. I cleaned the blood off."

She worked the hammer back, eased it back off, several times, checking the action, and then smiled up at him. "Looks a hell of a lot better without him attached to it, don't it?"

Jayne smiled back, "It still looks like a gorram toy to me."

"You killed him?" She watched his face.

"Sure as hell did." Jayne closed his teeth hard on the memory of Shy's blood-colored hair all spread out around her head in the gory muck, and Gustin screaming his hate for her. "His two boys, too."

Shy considered the pistol in her hands. "I wasn't the only girl he had, you know. You did the world a kindness."

Her eyes lingered a while longer on the pistol before she folded it back into the sacking and placed the bundle carefully on the shelf above her bunk. Her .32, though, she set close to hand on the bedside table.

Then she sat looking down at her hands in her lap.

"What?" Jayne asked her.

"I..." Shy started and then fell silent again. "Thank you, Jayne." She got it out this time, and looked around her. "For, you know. Everything."

Jayne shrugged a little awkwardly. Accusations, orders, bullshit, he was used to. Not this kind of wide-eyed, serious-as-a-sucking-chest-wound gratitude. "I'll take it out in trade when you're square again."

She set her hand on his thigh and ran her fingers up and down the long muscles there. "Damn straight," she murmured, looking at him through her lowered eyelashes. Jayne about jumped out of his skin, he'd been missing her touching him so bad. Then she winked at him. "And I'm a fast healer. Just ask the doc."

"Not fast enough," Jayne lamented, "If you keep going like that."

Damned if she didn't just run her hand up and give him a quick squeeze where it counted most; then Shy sighed and settled her hands back in her lap. Jayne had to think hard about all the things he could throw at Wash and his smart-ass mouth tomorrow before he knew he could look at Shy again without initiating something that would hurt her even if she was willing to give it a go. Then he took a deep breath and rose to his feet. It was hard to do. In a lot of ways.

She looked up at him and Jayne knew her--knew _women_--well enough to recognize the invitation in her eyes for what it was. It took some serious doing, but Jayne answered it with a shake of his head. "Doc says you got to rest on account of your hurts. And Mal wants me back at work in the bright and early. They won't get neither if I stay here tonight, rutting or not." He put out a hand and stroked her uncommon hair, brushed it back from her face, wound it loosely around his fingers. "You just get rested up and I'll be around. Said I'd look out for you, didn't I?"

She turned her head quickly and kissed the skin of his inner wrist. "That you did, pirate," she whispered. "That you did."

There was really nothing else to say. Nothing else to do but go to his bunk alone or climb into her narrow bed with her anyhow. So Jayne just turned and let himself out the door.

He headed down the dim corridor to his bunk hatch, thinking of her hair sliding through his fingers, thinking of the wild freedom of her laugh, of all the naughty bad fun they'd been up to and all they could get up to in those nights between here and Strand once she mended. He thought of her drawing that .32 smooth as anything and getting off three shots with two men beating her down, and the hole he'd blown in Gustin's throat and how gorram good it felt to find her alive after all of that.

And as he popped his hatch, climbed down the ladder into his quarters, Jayne whistled a jaunty tune all the way through to climbing into his bed.

Yes sir. Best damned twenty he ever spent.

15


	3. Shying Away Chapter 3

**Shying Away--Chapter 3**

It had been a long gorram day working on the new skiff with Wash and Mal, one that had sucked ass to a degree unparalleled in Jayne's experience. Whereabouts back on Govanne Mal'd found the busted up, broken down heap of trouble-ridden gos se, Jayne couldn't begin to guess even if he wanted to expend the energy, which he most certainly did not. But the captain had paid cash money for it and was damned single-minded about how it would hold wind again if they just spent enough time turning screws and welding pieces to it while listening to Wash crack damn fool jokes the whole time. Gorram it, what a shit-ass day.

But he had to admit the shit-assiness of it was mitigated somewhat when he ran into Shy on his way to shower the day off his skin. When he passed through the passenger lounge on his way to the shower closet, she got a whiff of him where she was sitting by herself reading and set aside her book without a word. Rising, she took his hand and dragged back to his bunk where she told him the scent of his sweat made her hot, and jumped on him. The resulting sex was loud, strenuous and more than a little dirty--which did not suck at all. Except, of course, when it did. Literally.

So all in all, Jayne decided maybe there was some gorram balance in the 'verse after all. Even if Wash's smart-ass jokes had to be a part of it. He bent his free arm--the one not wrapped around Shy's damp, naked, tattooed shoulders--behind his head and closed his eyes. There were worse ways for a man to live, he supposed, as he began to drift off into a well-earned working man's sleep.

"Who was she?"

Shy's voice in his ear perked Jayne right up the way a bucket of ice water upended over his crotch might. Never, ever, not even once, did those words coming from a woman lying naked with him mean anything but badness. Sometimes the running-out-the-back-door-trying-to-pull-on-his-pants-while-getting-shot-at kind of badness.

Jayne thought about pretending he was asleep but decided since his eyes had flown open when she spoke and Shy wasn't any kind of a lack-brain, that likely wouldn't work.

But wait just a gorram minute; it wasn't like they were bound to each other in any man and woman kind of way, except for how Jayne sure as shit didn't want her bound to anyone else. No big deal, then. He hoped. "Gorram it, what kind of question is that?" He groused at her, "She who?"

Shy snugged up tighter against him, played her fingers through the hair on his chest, ignoring the best stony look he could cast at her. "The one who taught you how to bed a woman."

Now there was a question no female person who asked it ever really wanted to know the answer to; Jayne'd learned that one early on, too. "Oh. Well, now..."

Shy leaned up on an elbow to look closer at him. "I'll be damned. Everything we've done to each other naked and this is all it takes to turn you bashful? I must be losing my touch." Lying back down she chuckled and flounced onto her side, away from him.

When her skin wasn't touching him anymore, she was suddenly much too far away. Jayne pulled her back to him to set the record straight, "You ain't either." Shy leaned against him, running her fingers over his hip and thigh lightly, idly; Jayne forgot what he was saying for a moment. "But what the hell you want to go and ask something like that for?"

"Because I want to know." She turned easily in the circle of his arm to face him again, the tattooed length of her a sinuous wash of moving colors, and drew meandering shapes on his bare belly skin with a fingertip.

It was compelling and distracting, the way that tickled, especially when that same fingertip began to travel the dark path of hair leading to that thick and curly place where his john thomas was enjoying a well-deserved nap. Oh hell, he figured, what sane man would argue? Taking her hand Jayne placed it where it would do the most good. And ai ya, Shy did not disappoint him. Lying back, Jayne closed his eyes again and let his world narrow to where her hand began deftly working him into a state he was going to have to do something about pretty soon, one way or another.

"Here's the thing." Her fingers fluttered and danced along the length of him. "When you've been under as many men as me, you notice stuff."

Jayne opened his eyes, raised his head and frowned at her. "Hey, now. The picture ain't helping me along any." But he was lying outright; that picture didn't matter a whit, not now, not when her hand was busy with him that way.

She knew it, too, and chuckled. "Bizui, pirate. Point is, a woman who knows men knows when one's trying to be good and when one's just... good. Aren't none of us born that way."

Jayne imagined there might be some kind of compliment buried in there someplace but he didn't have the time or inclination to go mining for it. Not right now, not when his joint was beginning to howl so loud for her that he couldn't hear anything else. First things first. "Don't much care long as I get mine."

"Sure," her hand never missed a beat, so to speak, "But you know the same difference on a woman."

And he did. But he didn't care. He _couldn't_ care right now; that hand was taking him fast to a place he was going to go with or without her. "So the hell what? I'm hard as redemption over here and you want me to answer gorram questions all night?"

"No," Shy grinned and threw a long leg over him, murmuring low and smutty in her throat, "No, that's not what I want you to do at all."

Jayne didn't need to hear any more than that, and pulled Shy up on top of him. Then, with a matched pair of deep indrawn breaths, it was on and the subject of who she was, tabled.

But it wasn't gone.

***************

_Who was she?_

Jayne was welding some long piece of steel to another piece of steel he'd welded to the skiff yesterday, trying to keep the bead straight at the ridiculous angle he was working at, leaning sideways and belly down halfway over the side when a picture came to him all sudden-like. It was a picture of someone he'd all but forgotten, dredged, no doubt, out of his mind by his confounding tattooed lover's gorram confounding question last night.

It was the picture of a girl Jayne knew back when he was nothing but a lanky kid, taller than every one of his friends and not yet grown into his own big, bony frame.

She lived next door to his folks' place. Since they'd played together as kids it seemed logical that they continued to do so long after they'd outgrown games of Runners-and-Feds. Her hand had been the first one to touch Jayne there that was not his own, and most of the time she did it almost as often as he asked her to.

She let him touch her, too, and he remembered clear enough how it was like some special brand of magic the way her face changed when he did it right, like when a bullet he'd fired hit its target exactly where Jayne'd meant it to. With a young marksman's eye for detail, Jayne learned to change her expression with precision and a steady hand.

What the hell _was_ her name, anyway?

Once Jayne had grown into himself, grown strong and lean and hungry, he'd gone off to work; she'd grown into herself even more and was some pretty hot property last time he'd seen her, all hemmed 'round by puffed-up rich men's sons. Last he'd thought of her was too long ago to be sure of--he thought maybe he'd heard tell she got herself married and moved to some world closer to the core. Or maybe that she'd died of the damp-lung. Jayne couldn't remember for sure. But what was her _name_?

Jame frowned behind his shield-mask, trying to pull her name back to him.

"Jayne."

No, that weren't it. It was longer. Something like Elizabeth, but not.

_"Jayne!"_

He almost had it, could feel it hanging around the edges of his mind.

Someone pounded hard on the beam he was leaning over; it made him blink and look down into Mal's face. Jayne knew the look--Mal was powerful pissed about something. It was visible even around the welding goggles over Mal's eyes And then it came to him.

"Ellisand." _That _was her name_. Ellisand._

Mal's eyes grew darker and wider behind the glass than Jayne had thought possible. "Turn that ruttin' torch off before you melt a hole in my gorram boat." The captain didn't have to raise his voice much to sound damned upset. Jayne thumbed the fuel switch off on the welding torch and the sparks fizzled and died.

When it was out, he raised his shield. "What flew up your drawers?"

Mal tore his goggles off and swelled visibly, he took such a deep breath. "Oh, I don't know--maybe it was a chunk of that slag you're slopping all the hell over the place. Where's your damn head at, Jayne? 'Cause it sure as hell ain't here fixing this skiff, where I told it to be."

Jayne looked down at his work. The last part was a mess all right, the weld wavy and slagged, and when he looked further down, damned if Mal wasn't right. There was a fair amount of mess spattered about where molten steel had dropped and run from the seam unnoticed. Jayne pulled himself upright to sitting on the beam he'd been hanging over, and cleared his throat. "Damn shame, that there."

"No shit." Mal fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare. "You conjure a way to fix it, Jayne?" But without waiting for a reply Mal answered his own question. "'Cause I have an idea: how about you do your gorram job right the first gorram time?"

"Come on, Mal," Jayne set the welding wand torch on the beam with a sigh and a frown. "You know I ain't a ruttin' welder anyhow! I shoot things. And hit stuff. Hell--Zoe welds better than me and she's--"

"If you say 'a woman' Jayne, so help me, I will let her have at you once and for all." Mal fisted his hands on his hips.

Jayne considered having at Zoe for a moment--not for the first or last time, either, not by a long shot--and decided Mal must mean a different kind of having than that. "I was gonna say 'infantry,'" Jayne pointed out before lowering his head. "I'm just a little off today. Didn't get much sleep is all."

Mal stepped closer and his eyes blazed hotter, if that was even possible. "Look here, Jayne, 'cause I'm only saying it the once." Mal's voice had dropped low so Jayne had to pay attention to hear him, but there was no missing the anger in it. "I got no problem transporting Shy that I wouldn't take up with her direct--she don't cause trouble or eat much far as I can tell, and she ain't underfoot every time I turn around. But if her contribution to being a passenger on my boat is to hump you useless all night long, we're all gonna have a problem--you, me and her. Fact is, that skiff don't run, we got no ground transport. No ground transport means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs means hardship, and not a one of us welcomes any more of that. Especially if it comes from you getting your gorram deck waxed till you're too wrung out to do your damn job. Dong luh ma?"

He held Jayne's gaze unblinking until Jayne looked down. "Yeah, Mal. I got it. Sorry."

Mal stood and looked at him for a long moment, then said, turning on his heel, "If I was you, I'd get the cutting torch, hack that chunk back off, and start all over with your head where it belongs."

Jayne knew he was right, but it didn't make him wish it was otherwise any less. At least Wash had made himself scarce when Mal started ranking him out. That was something, Jayne supposed. The captain could use a good hump himself; might shake him loose and improve his humor some. With a sigh, Jayne lowered himself from the beam and jumped the last few feet to the deck to go get the cutting torch.

_Ellisand._ That was her name.

*****************

He made it to the shower this time without running into Shy, which was sort of disappointing. But he went on ahead to scrub the dirt and sweat and dust off him anyhow. Hot as his sweat might make her, no woman worth having wanted to get skin-to-skin with a man who stunk as much of dirty slag and flux and cut metal as Jayne could smell on himself right now.

His shower was uneventful until he was finishing up, and then, as he was drying his feet, another picture surfaced from his memory. It wasn't as old a memory as that of Ellisand; Jayne was older in this one by five or six years and he remembered the name that went with this picture immediately: _Fat Maude._

Fat Maude was a whore, a stout woman with a curling fall of heavy hair black as The Black, a laugh you could hear three blocks away, and mad, mad skills in the sack. Jayne saw her regular while living on the dockside of Shilling working as a cargo grunt. It was back-busting work that crippled strong men young and paid next to horseshit, and Jayne was already learning how collection work for some of the wharf bosses paid ten times as much. There wasn't much enjoyment in breaking balls and kneecaps either, but at least they weren't _his_ balls and kneecaps and his ma sure was sure glad of the extra he was able to send home.

"My, my," Fat Maude had said to Jayne the first time she'd undressed him and looked him over naked, "Ain't you just built like a young bull." Her eyes traveled down him and then she smiled, showing a fetching set of dimples. "It's gonna be good to be Miss Maudy tonight."

It was Fat Maude who let Jayne in on the greatest secret he'd ever been told: That women liked sexin' as much as men given the chance, and were just as interested in getting theirs before it was through. The thing is, Maude told him, womenfolk _have_ to pretend it's all about sweets and daisies and stupid music crap, is all--else the 'verse treats them shameful badly.

Except for whores, Maude clarified. A whore could be just as straight as she cared to about a good--or bad--hump because the 'verse already treats her shameful badly. It was one reason Jayne spent so much time and cash in their company--a whore'd let a man know plain where he stood, if he had cash money and balls enough to ask.

"But any girl'll tell you how to get at the truth of her," Maudy had told him that long-ago good sweaty night by a single lamplight turned down low, "You just gotta pay attention, is all, 'cause she likely won't use words. Pay attention and she'll straighten every hair on your fine young self. But get after her all hasty, and I promise you--once she's scared of what you got, there ain't a thing you can do with it that'll make her happy except put it back in your pants."

"Ain't I paying attention?" Jayne had teased her, moving as slow as that hot, sticky night had dictated. He remembered how the whorehouse bedroom's open windows had let in the sweltering air and the low groans of docking boats coming to ground in the wharves across the way.

She'd purred low in her throat; lying on her Jayne had felt the sound vibrate clear through his chest. "You're sure enough a quick study, yearling." She giggled then, bouncing Jayne on her like a well-padded earthslide as her wise hands traced light and shadows across his skin.

And that's where Jayne's memory bled into a lot of others that ended the same way, and drifted clean away.

He shook his head and stepped into his clean pants, slung his towel around his neck and walked out of the showercloset barefoot.

Damn, he was hungry.

***********

Once he'd gone to his bunk and finished dressing, Jayne headed to the galley to see if anyone was cooking something he might be able to get in on.

Lucky enough, Kaylee was at work over the burners, and Shy was seated across the table from Book, each of 'em holding a handful of cards.

"Tall card?" Jayne pulled up a chair next to Shy who shot him a grin before turning back to the fan of cards in her hand.

"Why, yes it is," the shepherd answered.

"Is there betting?" There was a bowl full of something on the table; Jayne leaned across and grabbed a handful. Whatever else it was, it was crunchy and salty, and that worked for him.

"No," Book smiled at Shy across the table, "Just a game among friends. Are you in?"

Jayne winked at Shy, chewing. "Long as there's no betting. 'Cause I played her once, and she cleaned me out." He swallowed. "I think she's one of them sharks."

Book looked from Jayne to Shy and then at his hand of cards. He frowned and smiled at the same time, and tossed them on the table. "That would explain a lot," the shepherd muttered dryly to no one in particular and then noted, "I fold."

Shy shrugged her tattooed shoulders and grinned at him. "Honest, I wasn't working you, preacher," She chuckled and threw down her own hand, "Luck's just treating you like gos se tonight. It happens sometimes." She slid the cards towards Book. "Come on--deal 'em. You in, pirate?"

Kaylee didn't give any sign she'd be done cooking any time soon and there wasn't much else to do, so Jayne shrugged. "Aw, what the hell. Sure."

The shepherd paused to look at them both skeptically, but he began to shuffle the cards.

It was a good enough evening; Wash came and joined the game after a few hands, and then Mal and Zoe sat down to shoot the shit while the rest played cards. When Kaylee's dinner was done, Inara joined them to eat, and then the doc and his bedbug sister, and everyone talked at once.

Jayne liked it every bit as much as he would never admit it.

Finally though, as night wore on, things broke up and folks drifted off to bed or parts unknown until it was just Jayne and Shy left alone at the table together. Shy yawned and stood up. "I'm for bed."

Jayne was damned tired himself, but he always slept hardest and best after some good trimming. Besides--the dark green dress Inara'd gave her looked right hot on her with all that blood-red hair tumbling down the back of it. "Alone?"

Shy stood and considered him all sassy-like, hands on her hips. "I don't know, pirate. I hear tell a hard day's welding takes the starch right out of a man." Then she grinned and took his hand.

"Aw, shut up," Jayne grumbled as he led her down the corridor easy enough. "I got starch. I got _plenty _of starch."

They went to his bunk because the bed in her quarters was too damned small for both of them to sleep on, let alone rut more than a quick wham-bam in, and the walls were thin--or so the whiny-ass doc had insisted after pounding incessantly on the door most of the one night they'd tried it.

Besides. No way Jayne was going to sleep away from Vera and the rest of his girls. A lot could happen in a night out here in The Black.

They were both as tired as in need of each other, so it was fast. Jayne grinned against her skin at how quick she kindled and burned beneath him, just like a well-laid fire, until the sweet moment took them both.

And then they fell asleep.

***************

It all went south the next morning, as they gathered for breakfast.

Without any kind of warning or hint, River Tam stood up suddenly, leaned across the table towards Shy to say matter-of-factly, "'No girl with hair that willful color can grow into a decent god-fearing woman.'"

Everyone else fell silent, looking from the crazy girl to where Shy sat, stiff, froze in the middle of buttering a piece of bread, her face gone a fast shade of pale behind the faint smile she forced her lips into the shape of. "Go on, now, girl. Eat your breakfast." Her voice shook a little.

But River leaned closer, her dark eyes fixed on Shy's green ones, to tell her solemnly, "'It's hell's own mark, that hair.'"

"River!" The doc frowned at his sister and shot an apologetic glance in Shy's direction.

Shy set her bread aside; her hands clenched into fists. "That's enough." Beneath the painted pictures, her skin had gone dead colorless but her eyes blazed greenly.

Simon rose to his feet now, but River moved gracefully away from him around the table to lean even closer to Shy. "'Let hell have her, before she taints another righteous man.'"

Before any of the others could move, Shy was on her feet, a blur of fluttering red and moving colors, lunging across the table at the girl and leading with her butter knife; in her unwavering hand it suddenly looked dangerous as any blade Jayne owned. "Shut yourself up, child," Shy spoke with ominous quiet now, "Or I will see to it."

Zoe had her gun out almost as fast as Mal had his. When she heard those hammers come back cocked, Shy froze again. After a moment she tossed the knife onto the table and straightened slowly, holding her empty hands where both Mal and Zoe could see them.

In the long shocked quiet, she swept their shocked faces with an unreadable expression, her eyes dark and wide and inscrutable. After a moment and without a word, she turned her back on them all and nearly ran on fast long strides out of the galley, her hair fluttering on the breeze of her passing.

"Well." Mal watched her go, easing the hammer back on his gun as he looked after her thoughtfully for a long moment. "That was... bewildering. Jayne, do we need to fear her coming back here armed any time soon?"

Jayne shrugged and kept eating his fried protein. "Hell if I know. Wanted to do it myself a time or two once the crazy girl starts talking."

Mal's cold gaze settled on him now. "You best see to it she don't." When Jayne frowned at him, uncomprehending, the captain raised his eyebrows. "_Now_ would be good, Jayne."

"Aw, shit," Jayne muttered; tossing his fork and napkin on the table, he shoved his chair back and stood up. "Gorram moonbrain wrecking another decent meal."

******************

The doors to Shy's quarters was closed when he got there; Jayne considered walking in and then reconsidered; she had two guns in there with her. He knocked instead. "Hey, girl. It's me. Don't shoot, okay? I'm comin' in."

There was no reply one way or the other. Jayne paused with his hand on the door-slide. "Shy?"

"Don't want to talk, pirate." Her voice sounded even further away than the heavy door between them accounted for. "Nothing personal, just ain't in a talking mood."

Jayne considered that; made sense, the way he saw it. As far as he was concerned, talking started most of the trouble in his world, anyway. "What kind of mood are you in, then?"

And while he didn't really expect her to come back with, _The kind of mood to jump your bones, Jayne Cobb, _he supposed anything was possible.

What she said, however, was one single word. "_Bad_."

"That's it?" Jayne snorted. "Hell--I'm in a bad mood all the time. What's so damn special about that?"

There was no answer from behind the door for so long he wondered if maybe she'd fallen asleep in there, or found a back way out of her quarters or something. Then the door slid open.

Shy motioned him in with one hand; when he went, she slid the door closed again behind them.

Jayne sat down on her bed, marveling all over again at how gorram tiny the passenger quarters were. He thought his bunk was tight. Shy sat down beside him, looking down at her fingers laced together in her lap, and said nothing.

"The captain wants to know if you're gonna come out shooting." Jayne leaned back against the wall.

Shy didn't look up to answer him. "No. I ain't. But best keep that girl away from me."

"Hey, preaching to the flock, here." Jayne agreed, "At least she didn't take after you with a butcher knife. Laid me open, she did." He didn't say why; he didn't want to remember why, himself. But knowing why the crazy girl took a knife to him made Jayne wonder a little about what she'd said that had Shy so ready to return the favor. "You seen the scar."

Shy nodded, her hair sliding over her shoulders, but made no reply at all so Jayne shrugged and went on. "Alliance scrambled her like an egg, see, left her crazier than a shit-house rat. She talks out of turn, is all. Most times she don't even mean anything by it."

He fell suddenly silent, listening to himself, struck dumb by the notion that he, Ma Cobb's son Jayne, was actually defending tight-assed Simon Tam's gorram moon-brained little sis.

"Thought you heard the part about me not wanting to talk, pirate." Shy raised her head to look him in straight the eye. She wasn't smiling.

Jayne grinned at her anyway and shrugged. "Ain't you been payin' attention to the scuttle around here? I can't be trusted."

"You hwundan," A small smile fought to show itself on Shy's face. And when he threw his closest arm loosely around her shoulders, she didn't smack him or anything, so he left it there.

"She's fragged us all, one time or another, is all I'm saying. It's just crazy talk, what comes out of her mouth."

Shy said nothing, but she turned to face him. "I'm talked out, Jayne. What else have you got for me?"

Jayne frowned down at her, trying to make sure she wasn't kidding, that he wasn't missing something she'd throw him out on his ass for, but he couldn't find a thing. "What--you want to arm-wrestle?"

She smiled and shook her head. "Not so much."

"Just checking," Jayne shrugged, considering. After a quick silent systems check he figured it wouldn't take much to give it a good try, anyhow. "Slide on over here, woman. I got an idea."

*********************

Jayne slid the door closed behind him, hoping he wasn't too late getting down to the damned skiff, and if he was, that Mal would cut him some slack for trying to keep Shy from tangling it up with crazy River.

Wasn't like it was a sham; after all, Shy'd said flat out she wasn't planning to go after the girl. And when Jayne had left her loose-limbed and smiling in her narrow bed, Shy'd been in a pretty damned good mood.

When he passed the shepherd in the narrow hallway, he didn't think much of it until Book stopped him with a question.

"How is she?"

Jayne considered answering that honestly, but given the preacher's unsettling preacher vows, decided he likely wouldn't fully appreciate it anyway. "She ain't gunning for River, anyway."

Book smiled. "That's good to hear." He looked down the hall towards Shy's door. "I thought maybe I'd pay her a visit myself. A soul can't have too many willing ears."

Personally, Jayne disagreed flat--two willing ears were enough for any soul, to his way of thinking. After all, that's what folks was born with. But he shrugged; it was a free 'verse--out here in The Black, anyway. Something occurred to him as he shouldered past the shepherd, though, and he turned back. "You're going to want to knock before you go in there, preacher."

Book frowned. "Of course. I wouldn't just walk into anyone's..." Then his eyes widened. "Oh." Then they narrowed and fixed on Jayne. "_Oh_." The shepherd shook his head, frowning his preachery disapproval. "Really, Jayne."

Jayne winked and grinned. "Good luck, Shepherd." And he walked away, still smiling.

*****************************

After another day of mule-work--one that left them all in a better mood since it seemed they might just be able to fire up the damned thing someday soon and see what she did once they settled on terra again--and a long shower, Jayne went looking for Shy.

She wasn't in the mess galley, she wasn't reading in the passenger lounge, and when he asked around, no one had seen her since breakfast except himself and maybe the preacher. But he didn't see the preacher either, so he couldn't ask.

Jayne frowned and headed for her bunk. Gorram--had she sat in alone there the whole damn day? A tinge of something unfamiliar chewed at him all the way through the ship; just as he pulled up to a stop in front of her door, his heart beating loud in his chest, Jayne realized it was worry.

He knocked, called, "Hey, woman. It's me. You in there?"

Her voice came to him softly, "It's open, pirate. Come on in."

So he did, and found her sitting on her bed gazing down at one of the pictures on her skin--the one he'd noticed back on Govanne, on her forearm, the grassy valley with the yellow flowers and the trees and the wind. She looked up at the sound of his steps, and smiled so sadly Jayne frowned. "I lied to you," she said.

"So?" Jayne sat down next to her, looked down at the picture on her skin. "What about?"

"This." She laid her arm across his thighs so he could see the picture better. "It's where I lived when I was a kid."

"Huh." Jayne ran his fingers across the clear sky, across the blades of grass, the yellow blooms, the treeline, that still looked to him to be moving in a breeze. His sharp eyes again found the tiny house all but hidden behind the hills, the tiny curl of smoke unfurling from its chimney. He shrugged. "No harm in it. Sure is small."

She grinned again, no little less sad-looking. "It's how I remember it, last time I saw; I was in a shuttle looking down." Shy raised her eyes, looked around the room. "I was maybe nine, ten. That was the last time I was aship before now."

Jayne thought about that a moment, then sat back and looked at her. "You were stuck on that shit heap Govanne since you were a kid?" And when Shy nodded, he shook his head. "Hell. That's just... unnatural."

"Sure was," she murmured, looking down at the picture on her arm.

She looked so small there, all sudden-like, not saying anything, just tracing that curling strand of smoke with her fingertips. Jayne cleared his throat and set his hand on her leg awkwardly. "But look where you're at now, living the life."

That made her look up and grin from behind a strand of hair that fell over an eye. But whatever she might have said was interrupted by a very hefty growl from Jayne's empty belly.

They both looked down, and Shy chuckled.

"What?" Jayne protested, "I'm hollow as a bitch wolf." He stood up. "Come on--let's go see what we can wrassle up in the mess galley."

But Shy's smile melted away and she remained seated. "Aw, you go on ahead, pirate. I'm good." She wouldn't look at him, either; wouldn't look at anything but that picture on her forearm.

Gorram it, Jayne was _hungry_. And Shy was a grown woman, surely able to know when she was in need of eats and not. So why was it so gorram hard to turn and walk out of her bunk all of a sudden?

Whatever the reason, Jayne decided it just plain sucked. He sighed heavily, crossed his arms over his chest and stood looking down at her until she glanced up. Then he asked, "So, you just gonna sit in here till we reach Strand so you don't run into the moonbrain again? That's a whole lot of rope to give one little girl, even if she is crazy."

Shy frowned hard at that, and for a second Jayne thought she might tell him to go hump himself. But then she shrugged. "Just don't want any trouble, pirate. That's all."

Jayne sat down again. "Trouble's all that girl is, even if it ain't her own doing. Hiding from her won't change nothing. You ain't the first to want to shut her up permanent--not by a long shot. Just can't do it, is all."

He waited but Shy didn't say anything so he stood up again. "C'mon, now. Let's find some chow. Then maybe we can play some cards or get naked or something." That made her smile, even if a little sadly.

When he offered her a hand up, she took it and stood; then her smile turned downright saucy. "Maybe we could get naked and play cards."

Jayne considered that as they moved to, and through, the door. He chuckled, "Damn straight. I'll show you why they _really_ call it 'tall card'."

***********************

No one bothered them; it was late enough by then that the only other person in the galley was the shepherd, reading his book with a cup of hot something steaming beside him. He looked up at them both and smiled, but said nothing. Not until Shy greeted him first, saying, "'Evening, man of god."

Then Book smiled wider at her, "Good evening, Shy, Jayne." The way Shy smiled a little back at him made Jayne wonder in passing if maybe the preacher got her to talk after all with that extra set of ears. But she didn't say anything so he forgot about it.

They ate some of what Jayne found in a covered kettle on the quiet burners--leftover chili Wash had made, the preacher said, adding "But I can't recommend it with a clear conscience." The strength of the peppers in it made Jayne's eyes water and that was damned tasty by his accounting, anyway.

Then they made some of that small talk that Jayne figured was a complete waste of time and air, where no one really says anything they couldn't have just stayed quiet about for all the difference saying it made. But he suffered through it as long as he could because Shy seemed more at ease than he'd seen her since breakfast, and for some gorram dumb-ass reason that mattered to him all of a sudden.

And just when he couldn't stand it any more, Shy shoved her chair back from the table and looked at Jayne. "Ready for bed, pirate?"

"Shit. I was born ready." Jayne winked at her and turned to grin at the shepherd, who just shook his head and dropped his eyes back to his book.

*******************

When they were back in Jayne's bunk, the whole gorram day fell away from them like their clothing, shed, discarded and forgotten, just like that. Then they were in his bed and all over each other, sweat-slick and salty, tangled up the way lives get, breathing harsh and fast, making sounds that had no words in them, visiting and revisiting that sweet agony that makes a body know he ain't dead and damned sure glad of it.

Finally they'd had so much of each other they fell asleep--Shy fitted warm and quiet against him and Jayne snoring evenly in her ear. And neither of them dreamed, and the pictures on Shy's skin were only tattoos, and the names in Jayne's head sank back into everything else he'd all but forgotten.

And who they were didn't matter a gorram bit.

For a while, anyway.

***********************

_Reavers caught them unawares and there was no time to wonder exactly how, or who had failed to do the one thing that might have spared Mal and his crew such a woeful fate. All Jayne knew was how one moment Serenity was a mote moving across the dark eye of The Black, and the next she was a tin can full of screaming and blood. One moment the Reavers weren't there, and the next they were. One moment he was sleeping next to Shy in his bunk, and the next he was running backward up the gangway, laying down cover fire for her and Kaylee--the only ones he was able to get to as the ship was overrun--while the three of them tried to make for a shuttle. One moment he was fighting for their lives. And the next, he was down, his spine shattered by a bullet to the neck._

_As he lay there dying under a pile of Reavers doing things to him he was mightily grateful he couldn't feel, Jayne heard someone screaming, making high, hopeless sounds with no more human in them than in the rabbit's death-shriek once the fox catches hold. Might be Kaylee. Might be Mal. Hell--it might even be him, he supposed._

_One thing he was sure of, though, it wasn't Shy. Her death had been almost as quick as it was horrific once the Reavers pulled her away from where she'd crouched over Jayne--out of ammo and snarling like a bitch over pups--and started taking her skin off. Who'd have guessed they'd fancied tattoos so? _

_As the world faded out on him, Jayne's last thoughts were prayers to God Almighty and anyone else who might listen to roll time back a ways, just far enough that he could take Shy's .32 when she'd offered it to him, take it and put a bullet to her and Kaylee, and then eat the barrel himself._

_This here was no halfway decent person's death. Not by anyone's measure._

_Speaking of Reavers, damned if one didn't lean over to speak directly into Jayne's ear. _"It's okay,"_ It said quietly. _"Wake up."

_Jayne's eyelids fluttered._

"Come on now, wake up." _Louder now, further away_. "You're okay."

And suddenly Jayne was sitting up in bed with a head and heart pounding full of a killing will to live, breathing hard and blinking away the darkness. Someone standing across the small space of his bunk said, "Easy, pirate. It's just a dream."

It didn't _look_ like no Reaver.

He shook the last webs of sleep out of his head and reached up to turn on the bedside light, rubbing his face with his other hand. Then he looked closer at the figure speaking at him.

It was Shy. And her fine sweet skin--every colored, patterned inch of it--was attached to her flesh. Jayne exhaled a deep breath and frowned at her, "What are you doing way the hell over there?"

She chuckled. "Staying out of reach. The way you were carrying on, you'd've sent me airborne if I touched you. That's all good and fun till you hit a wall." Stepping closer, Shy leaned over, stroked the line of his shoulder hesitantly before coming back to sit on the edge of the bed. "Bad dream, huh?"

Now he was awake, Jayne sure as hell didn't want to think on it. The sound her skin had made tearing away from the muscle beneath it still hung in his ears. "Yeah."

Her eyes said she was thinking about asking, so he was powerful glad when she just nodded instead. "You okay?"

Even in the gos se lighting she looked like a painting or one of them uptown art statues. Or maybe a statue of a painting. Or a painting of a statue. And being alive, finding her alive, after a dream like that one made him want to celebrate the fact. Jayne slid an arm around her waist. "Yup. 'Cept here I am awake in the middle of a good long night, and I scared my woman out of bed." The words just sort of slipped out.

Shy stiffened in his embrace. "Your woman, hmm?"

He considered claiming she'd misheard him, or lying outright, but in the end Jayne just ran both hands slowly up her bare back and back down again. "You heard me." Reached around her to cup those twin swells, a weeping moon and a grinning sun, teasing them awake until she leaned back against him and sighed, closing her eyes.

But her eyes flew open again and she sat forward, shaking her head like she was trying to stay awake. "But what do you mean?"

"Well, ain't you? I mean, whose bed are you in, here?" His hands busy, Jayne leaned closer to kiss the back of her neck. "Don't mean we're hitched or none of that chui nui, if that's what you're so scared of."

She looked back over a shoulder at him, green eyes gleaming in the light like gemstones on a rich woman's hand, and considered him like Jayne was a bomb needed defusing or something. "I don't belong to anyone."

"Aw, shut up," Jayne muttered against her smooth painted skin, "Ain't what I meant and you know it." He put his teeth to her right there, right where her neck became her shoulder; bit her gently right where a flock of tiny painted crows spun into a spiral of ink, right where he knew it'd make her go to hard-burn the fastest.

Sure enough, her breath quickened immediately and Shy's fingers found and tightened in his hair. Jayne grinned and closed his teeth a little harder, smiled wider when her breath hitched and her eyes fell shut.

Sometimes Jayne figured if he were a doctor or a ship captain or something other than just some simple workingman, it might get old, having to be right all the damn time. But not here, not in bed. In bed, being right paid off better than cashie money. And it was _free_. Fleetingly he thought of Fat Maude, of Ellisand, and listened to his painted lover whisper his name with trembling breath.

When he drew her by the shoulders to face him, she didn't resist; Jayne pulled her close and lowered his mouth to that swell of sun, of moon. Making a low sound in her throat, Shy let her head fall back until her hair spilled like dark wine onto the sheets behind her.

When Jayne finally raised his head again, she leaned close to murmur into his ear, her voice smiling and ragged, "Your woman says lie down, pirate."

She was all over him then like soft rain, like hard summer sun, like a hundred pairs of hands and a dozen hungry mouths, making him shiver, setting him afire, making him twist and groan like a rope bridge in a windstorm until it was almost more than Jayne could bear and still have something left to give her.

And then she was under him and Jayne was all tangled up in every salty-sweet shade of her, hands buried deep in the flowing cool flood of her hair as she ebbed and rose against him. And even when they were belly to sweat-slapping belly and making raw animal sounds, even here and now Jayne was still no closer to figuring how every single inch of her could feel as gorram good against him as that first time he'd measured out the length of her with his own skin, except that here in his bed Shy was right all of the time.

Finally they were still again, Jayne all but asleep, his arm resting in the curve of her waist where it fit closer to perfect than most things in his whole life. As he sank into sleep, Shy whispered beside him, "Three more."

"Huh?" He asked without opening his eyes.

"Nights to Strand."

Jayne frowned and yawned at the same time, rolling over onto his back. "Oh. That. Don't fret it, girl. Lots can happen in three nights--engine could founder. Feds could catch us. Or we could explode." He scratched his chest thoughtfully. "Hell--we're always almost exploding round here."

Turning with him, Shy fitted against his side. "Oh," Her voice was full of dry amusement in his ear. "Well, that makes it _lots_ better."

It made him smile a little. "I'm just saying. Don't do no good to wind yourself up over something ain't happened yet is all. Go to sleep."

She was quiet for so long that he might actually have dreamed her whispering softly, "Easy for you to say."

**************************

_Three more._

It caught up with him the next day and hit him hard as an ironwood fence post upside the head.

_Three more._

And then Shy would be gone.

After working he headed to the shower, part of him wishing for the Alliance, or engine trouble or some other gorram thing to come up and stretch time beyond its limits.

He found Shy in her quarters, after, and the way she looked up from the bit of cloth in her hands she was bent over and smiled at him when he came through the door caught at something in Jayne's chest and pulled so tight it hurt. Jayne looked around her quarters and imagined what they would look like without her in them any more, just another empty passenger bunk, and that made him sit down beside her, catch her up in his arms and squeeze her hard enough to make her eyes go all curious and concerned. He cleared his throat and loosened up on her.

Shy leaned against him. Freeing an arm, she wrapped it around one of his. "Bad day?"

She smelled sweet, like candy. Like Kaylee. Without even having to look around, Jayne guessed the girl must have given Shy some of her own scented soap. Gorram, she smelled so tasty he wanted to lick the sweetness from her skin like she was a bright stick-candy on Winter's Eve. Instead, he said only, "Close enough." Then his eyes fell again on what she was holding in her other hand--a scrap of pale cloth stretched on some kind of round frame, with a needle and some colored thread hanging from it. "What's that?"

Ducking her head, Shy shrugged. "The preacher came by again this morning. Asked what I was good at besides whoring and card-sharking and arm-wrestling." She raised her head to grin a little wickedly at him, "'Course, he didn't use those exact words," before looking down again to say, "Seems the captain said he'll help try to set me up with something on Strand if he knows what to look for." Her eyes were dark and troubled when she looked back up and met Jayne's eyes squarely. "Why would he do that? Man hardly knows me."

Jayne considered that for a moment and shrugged. "Mal knows about starting over." And if that wasn't the truth, Jayne didn't know one; still, he didn't like to think on the chance the captain had given him any better than he liked to think about why it had been necessary.

Her green eyes were curious on him a long while until she nodded to herself. Holding the cloth where Jayne could see it better, she said, "Something my mama taught me--said it was a proper lady's past time." Her voice went low and bitter all of a suddenlike. "For all the rutting good it did either of us." But when Jayne looked, there was no sign of it on her face.

"What is it?" Jayne asked again, cocking his head to one side to try and see it better.

Shy held it out to him and he took it. Damned if the surface of the stretched cloth wasn't covered in tiny flowers--yellow and blue and red--all stitched with threads in twining patterns. He even recognized some of them from his ma's garden when he was a kid: glad-bells, kiss-me-kates, blue-buttons. Jayne hadn't thought about them in years.

What the hell anyone was going to do with a bitty scrap of cloth covered in strings of flowers he couldn't fathom, but it was right pretty and he told her so.

And if he didn't know better, he'd have believed the praise made her blush a little. "It isn't anything, really. Just seeing if I recall how to do it. Kaylee, though, she made me these clever stretchers right handy out of something she had--blown valve collars, she said, or some damn thing. And the preacher gave me a needle and colored thread from his sewing kit and rustled up some cloth for practice." She held up the scrap again and chuckled. "I think this is a piece of his pillowcase." But then the humor drained right out of her face. "Guess the captain thinks I might be able to get work with a tailor or a seamstress or something, if I can remember how to work a needle."

Jayne waited for her to go on, but she said nothing more. Instead, she sat silent and still within his arm around her, looking down at her handful of thread flowers. Didn't take a rutting magistrate to name the sadness that had settled into her face for what it was. Sadness, and fear as well. And Jayne felt the same thing trying to refashion his expression as well so he frowned instead. "It'll beat the gos se out of humping fuel jockeys for some pissant hwundan like Gustin, I conjure." The sudden, unbidden image of Shy humping some guy--_any_ guy--for money or pure whimsy made his chest hurt bad, bad enough to threaten him with a right ugly mood. And whether that guy made her weep or sing didn't enter into it one iota. But he didn't say any of that.

Shy's eyes went to the bundle of sacking on the shelf next to her bed, the sacking wrapped around Gustin's dandified pistol, and stared icy-hard and unblinking. "It surely will."

Because changing the subject seemed like a very good idea all the way around, Jayne asked, "So. You decide to fence that thing or not?"

Shy rested her gaze on the bundle a little longer and finally turned back to him. "I thought maybe I'd hang onto it a while, see if I could make a living otherwise, first. Might come in handy, later on. You know?"

He did. A fancified inlaid hogleg like that would fetch enough even on a crap-rate fence market to buy her a small house outright on most edge worlds. Nothing fancy, but the kind of house a woman with the means to live there might want if she wanted to raise a kid or two away from the shitty parts of town. Jayne's mind went easily enough from there to an image of Shy standing in front of a clapboard farmhouse like the one he grew up in, with a basketful of apples and a couple red-head kids in hand, and the wind dancing in her long hair.

The image made something break in him like a rib.

Jayne took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah. Smart idea." Then he frowned down at her. "We gotta find you a stronghouse to lock it up in, though. Word gets around you have something like that all by yourself, some lowlife'll gut you in your sleep for it."

That made her smile her old-friends smile at him again, something he hadn't seen much of lately, and it soothed his hurt some.

"Do you remember where I come from?" She teased him, raising an eyebrow.

The hell of it was, for a second Jayne _had _forgotten.

For a second, it seemed she'd always been here, hard and soft within the circle of his arm.

Just for a second, it seemed they'd always been together.

Instead of getting up and running, which is what the pain in his chest told him to do, Jayne groused at her, "Yeah, yeah. You're my scary-ass dockside woman."

She rose against him to kiss his neck beneath the angle of his jaw, and whispered, "And don't you forget it." Grinning, she gave his earlobe a goodly nip on her way past.

That made Jayne think of different matters entirely.

*****************************

It was late when they emerged from Shy's quarters; they'd been busy with more compelling things than tracking time. Jayne was pretty okay with the hour, himself, because it was late enough that there'd likely be no one in the galley when they went in search of something to eat, and that meant Shy didn't buck the idea much. She hadn't got over her last run in with L'il Crazy, that's for sure.

And there wasn't anyone there when they got there—just a cleared table and a clean cooktop.

"I've got a hankerin' for eggs, woman. Hard-fried." Jayne threw himself down into a chair.

Shy arched an eyebrow at him. "Your hands are broken?"

"I cooked last night," he protested.

Shy laughed. "If I recall, Wash cooked last night. And god's man was feeling charitable enough towards us to say so."

Jayne considered that and shrugged. "Yeah. I guess so. But it was worth a try." He sighed heavily and got up. "Cmon then. Let's see what we got."

What they had turned out to be half a loaf of something meaning to be bread, a cold slab of something meaning to be cheese, and some tinned stuff that might have been spreadable nut butter or maybe liver. Much as Jayne was hating the thought of setting down on Strand, he was sure enough looking forward to some actual bona fide food again.

Afterwards, they played a few hands of cut-throat for stakes the nature of which Jayne couldn't wait to collect on later that night and honestly didn't mind losing, himself.

And out of the blue, right when he was finally holding a true winning hand, Shy asked, "Ever been there?"

Jayne frowned into his hand of cards; a natural cut-throat, a hand he'd been dealt in his lifetime only as many times as he could count on his fingers. "Huh?"

"Strand. I wonder what it's like, is all."

"I raise that thing you do with your mouth to match." Jayne frowned harder at his cards. "Strand? It's a gorram armpit of a place, same as most."

Shy raised her eyebrows in surprise. "The mouth thing, is it? Must be holding something real good." She considered the cards in her hand with a truly unreadable expression; damn, Jayne thought to himself, she was good. "An armpit, huh? Since Govanne was a right pigue, it's got to be better than that, then"

"Naw, it ain't so bad." Jayne wondered if she could be distracted before she answered his bet. He _knew _he should have opened lower. Playing cards with the gorram crew all this time was making him soft. "It's a place built on dirt-farming, mostly. Some towny places in between stretches. Folks are mostly just folks. A few rough traders but nothing you can't stay clear of or outdraw, I conjure."

Her face betrayed nothing at all as she nodded. No wonder she made so much sharking tall card. Silence fell on the galley like darkness as Shy considered her cards. Finally, she smiled wickedly at him, "I'll match the mouth thing and bounty up that slinky dress you like me in so much. And I'll raise you some shackles." When she finally changed expression it was only to wink and flash a lightning-quick dirty grin at him before going all card-faced again.

Gorram, she was ruthless. Jayne weighed the merits of folding his cutthroat hand and taking that dress, sleek, black, tight, off her-- something he was sure Inara had given Shy just to torment him—against the rare chance to trounce her soundly with a natural cut-throat, take his winnings with her to bed for some fine-quality gloating. He shook his head. Nope. Betting the dress could only mean one thing: she had a handful of gos se. Jayne wasn't about to let her win no matter what she was wearing. He grinned and threw down his hand. "My strike and I hope you're feeling damn sexy, woman. That there's a natural cut-throat."

"_Kao_," she swore with a low whistle and eyed the cards. "That takes the whole damn bounty and the blind purse, both." Shy glanced at both galley entries, her red hair spinning around her head and then she grinned at Jayne with a smile full of naughty bad fun. "Aren't you the lucky hwundan tonight."

He about fell out of his chair when she sank to her knees and disappeared under the table, and again when she resurfaced _there._ He spared a brief moment of alarm at the thought of someone walking in on them, but then Jayne stopped caring about much at all for a while except how gorram wonderful luck is when it blesses a man.

********************

Later on, back in his bunk, she made good on her losses with a vengeance until Jayne was wrung out wilted as a piece of Sunday laundry beat clean on a river rock. "Gorram, woman," he gasped, lying back and running his fingers through the long sweat-damp strands of her hair. Shy's head rose and fell on his chest with the rhythm of his heavy breathing. "I surely do like playing cards with you."

"Right back at you, pirate," she murmured. "Going to have to travel some for a rematch, though."

Jayne considered that with a frown. _Oh, yeah_. "Ain't so bad. We get to Strand a couple times a year. Mal's got business there fair regular."

She sighed, a long exhalation. "You'll have to look me up then."

"Damn straight I will."

And neither of them spoke for so long Jayne was falling asleep when he heard, like a whisper in his dreaming, "Two more."

That woke him sharp as a kick to the balls, and he lie there a long time with the throb of his hurt, staring into the dark listening to the sound of Shy's quiet, even breathing, taking the scent of her skin, her hair, her sweat as deep into his lungs as he could so there was no way he could forget.

Two gorram more.

*****************

"_You've got to be kidding. It's a gorram graze!" Mal shook his head, frowning down at where Jayne lay propped up against a cargo crate in the holding bay. "A gorram flesh wound! What the icy spine of hell is wrong with you these days, Jayne?"_

_Jayne looked down at his hands, pressed hard over the gaping hole in his chest. Blood leaked through them like dark running water and dripped onto, through, the floor grating. "I dunno, Mal. Feels like it goes pretty deep, you know, for a graze."_

_Mal stared down at him impassively. "I warned you," he said finally, "This is where a man ends up, consorting with whores. 'specially whores who arm-wrestle and play tall card. Ta ma de--every man knows that. "_

_Suddenly Inara was there for some reason, brushing Mal aside like he was made of sand or smoke. Why she was there, Jayne couldn't conjure; he sure as hell couldn't figure out why she was suddenly sinking to her knees beside him. "Poor Jayne." She smelled all of summer flowers. _

_Gently she moved Jayne's hands aside with her own, so small and smooth, her fingernails unimaginably clean besides his big bloody meathooks, and gazed upon his wound a long grave moment. And then Inara looked into his eyes and smiled. "Why, Jayne. Your heart's been torn right out."_

_Jayne frowned back at her. "That's what it feels like," he agreed slowly._

_She raised her hand to his forehead, gentle, cool on his skin. Inara looked deeply into his eyes and her voice was sober, solemn and kind, "It always does." _

"_The good news is it won't kill you." She smiled that way Inara had, a little sadness, a little sweetness, making it so confounding hard for a man to figure out her meaning in it. "The bad news is you'll wish it had. That can't be helped, I'm afraid. It's the nature of the hurt."_

_Jayne looked down at his hands, at the blood spilling between his fingers at an alarming rate. "Gorram. Where's that doc? I'm fixing to bleed to death right here on the rutting floor."_

_Inara looked back towards the infirmary over one smooth, pale shoulder, bare where her fine green robe had shifted a little. "Didn't you hear? Doctor Tam and Kaylee are taking refreshment poolside and can't be reached for comment." Then she turned back to face Jayne, who was beginning to feel sort of drifty as his world went all wavy around the edges. Inara smiled at him. "Don't worry. It's never that simple anyway." Her smile widened, brightened, and Jayne thought, That's a downright… what's the gorram word… smile Inara's got. _

_And as he lost consciousness, it came to him. _

_Radiant. That was it. _

_Downright _radiant_, Inara's smile._

"Hey, pirate."

_Someone was calling him across a great distance._

"Jayne!"

_And they wouldn't shut up and leave him to whatever peace was to be found in dying from a gaping chest wound where his heart was supposed to be and wasn't._

"Jayne, _wake up_!"

He woke with a start, sitting up in bed and feeling all over his chest with his hands. There was no hole there, no blood. With a sigh of relief he settled back down again to the sheets and turned to where Shy's shape was sitting up beside him. He could feel her looking at him even if he couldn't see and he was glad of the thick, heavy dark between them.

"Another one?" she asked quietly.

"Huh?" Funny thing was, he could still feel that hurt, right there in his chest even though his skin, muscle, bones lay unbroken beneath the weight of his hand.

He could hear her hair rustle, imagined her cocking her head to one side to look at him. "Bad dream. Another bad dream. You sounded…" Her voice trailed off uncertainly, and one of her hands settled lightly over his there on his chest.

With a grunt Jayne rolled over onto his side, away from her, and when Shy's hand slipped away from him, he waited for that hurt to lessen. But it didn't. Setting his jaw, he pulled the sheet up over his chest and closed his eyes.

Shy said nothing; behind his eyelids he could imagine the look that accompanied that silence and it made his chest hurt even worse. Gorram woman. He willed himself to sleep.

He felt her lie down, and then the mattress shifted again as she sat back up. In the darkness he heard rustling, felt her moving. Then, "I guess I'll see you later, then." And he heard the question lying under the words as clear as the flat finality that made him frown into the night and roll over onto his back once again, reaching for her hand without looking.

His fingers closed on a sleeve; she'd dressed that quickly. That figured, he supposed. Surely she'd had plenty of practice at it as a whore, dressing fast in the dark and leaving a man alone in bed. Jayne adjusted his aim and tried again; this time he caught Shy's wrist. "Where you goin'?" he asked.

"I… Back to my place." Her voice trembled a little and the pain in his chest widened; sure enough he'd hurt her feelings. Jayne was powerfully glad he didn't have to look at the expression the sound of her voice surely went with. "Didn't want to keep you awake."

Jayne considered a lot of replies, and all of them made him ache like a bad case of swamp fever. And he considered letting her go, being done with the pain once and for good.

But when he opened his mouth, what came out was, "Don't." And once it was said, the pain gave up some of its grip on him. "It was just a bad dream, is all."

She didn't resist when he drew her down beside him with his hand on her wrist and his arm around her waist; Shy even helped him help her undress once again. And when she was there, fitted against him with her arm around his belly, he raised up to kiss the top of her head quickly, awkwardly, and found he could breathe again.

Jayne fell asleep quickly after that. But not before his dozing mind noted that a man could, indeed, feel both pain and the absence of pain at the same time, and wondered which one hurt worse.


	4. Shying Away Chapter 4

When they woke again, it was what passed for morning in an unbroken long run in The Black. Jayne's sleep had remained unquiet; he couldn't remember any of what disturbed his rest after he and Shy had fallen back to sleep, but judging by the circles under Shy's eyes, she hadn't fared much better than him.

Jayne looked her over critically. "Woman," he finally observed, "You look like hell." And the damned thing was, the thing Jayne couldn't have explained even at gunpoint, the sight of her mussed hair and weary eyes still made him every bit as hard as an honest apology was.

"Feel like it, too," she yawned, and then shoved at him with one playful arm. "You're looking pretty slagged yourself, pirate."

Jayne frowned down at himself. "That so?"

"It is." She looked him up and down and then met his eyes. "Like Feds were chasing you in your sleep." When he said nothing at all, Shy sighed. Raising her hands, Shy began working her fingers through the tangles in her hair, setting the pictures on her skin into smooth motion; Jayne was captivated, transfixed by the sight, once again. "Works for you, though," she murmured behind her hair.

He watched as long as he could stand it and then his fingers joined hers, working through the cool, heavy strands until her hands fell to resting on his forearms. Shy closed her eyes. "If you were thinking of doing anything else today, you ought to stop that right now." She smiled against the palm of his hand.

Jayne watched that hand like it belonged to someone else, disentangling itself from her hair, sliding along the long smooth length of the line of her throat, her shoulder, her waist, over birds and stars and sailing ships and landscapes and phrases in alphabets he couldn't read, all of them vivid shades of every color he'd ever seen or imagined. Jayne brushed his fingertips lightly over the pictures, fascinated by how some of the inks raised her skin a little. A woman whose body he could read blindfolded; no way that could ever get old.

Things almost got complicated after that until they headed together for the ship's shower closet to kill two birds with one stone, hands all over each other.

* * *

As he and Shy neared the mess galley it became plain that they were all there ahead of them: Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, the shepherd and the Tams. When Shy's eyes found River she set her jaw and turned on her heel right there in the hallway, casting words over her shoulder. "I'm not hungry, pirate. You go on-I'll meet up with you later."

Jayne barely caught her arm as she started away, and pulled her to a stop. "Come on, now. That's just foolish talk."

"Don't want any trouble." She turned to stone in his hand, she went so tense, so cold. Shy smiled at him, but there was nothing pleasant in the look. "And I'm not going in there."

Jayne was torn between letting go of her and just hoisting her over his shoulder to put a stop to the nonsense; he was damn hungry. But it was Kaylee who took matters into hand, looking up from her plate and spotting them there. She smiled as sweet as only Kaylee could, and waved the hand not holding her fork. "Shy! Jayne! Come sit-there's room!"

"Well?" Jayne kept his voice low, just enough that Shy could hear it. "You still going to run?"

Shy swore at him beneath her breath, squared her shoulders, raised her chin like she was going into a fight, and replied, "Let's go."

The conversation they'd interrupted picked itself up again once they were seated; at least there was eats on the table, the wannabe bread and something that almost resembled scrambled eggs. Jayne couldn't exactly place what it most tasted like, but if he put enough pepper on it, it went down easy.

Things were uneventful mostly, until River stood up. Then Shy tensed up so hard Jayne could feel her stiffen from a foot away-but the crazy girl was only reaching for the bowl full of egg-type stuff. As she spooned some onto her plate her eyes met Jayne's across the table, somber and dark. "The chicken came first," she told him. "The rest is all propaganda. I need the pepper."

Jayne blinked and slid the pepper shaker across the table at her-what else was he going to do? Little Miss Crazy caught it without looking away from him; Jayne found that downright unsettling. Still, he supposed it wasn't exactly threatening, so he bent his head to his breakfast.

Then she had to go and fix that gaze on Shy.

"Eat up, sunshine," the girl smiled across the table at her, and gorram if it wasn't suddenly a beautiful thing to behold, River Tam's smile without any crazy in it at all, her voice taking on a higher, lighter sound than Jayne could recall ever hearing come out of her, _ever_. Why the gorram hell it made Shy freeze, her fork halfway to her mouth, and all the natural color come right out of her, he hadn't a drunkard's guess. "Strong bones don't build themselves, you know."

Shy gagged and dropped her fork. Swallowing hard, she wiped her mouth and stood so fast she'd have knocked her chair over if Jayne hadn't reached over and caught it. "Excuse me," she told the tabletop, her eyes huge, wide and terrified like she expected to see those Reavers in Jayne's dreams come hot after her any moment, and began to walk quickly out of the galley.

"No." Mal's voice made her pause mid-stride, and the sound of his chair pushing back from the table was loud in the sudden quiet as Mal stood up. "And just so's we're clear here, that's a telling thing, Shy, not an asking thing." And while Mal did not raise his voice beyond polite, even Shy heard the cutting edges of the words and knew them for what they were. She stopped in her tracks and glanced back uneasily over her shoulder.

Jayne sure as hell knew the tone so he was rising to his feet to go to her when River leaned further across the table and reached for him. Since her hand didn't have a butcher's knife in it this time Jayne forced himself not to recoil or slap her away, but it was harder than he cared to admit even to himself. But the girl simply patted his hand. "Don't fret, dear," she soothed him in that same high, gentle voice, "She's been a little sensitive since she killed me. That's all."

Shy had turned around, was halfway back to the table until River's words fetched her up in the galley doorway, a hand on either side of the door. There she balked, braced herself against walking through.

"What are you?" Shy whispered in a voice that reminded Jayne of dead fallen leaves skittering through the stubble of a winter field, her eyes dark and wide. And he'd had seen enough gut-shot men to recognize the grey sickness that changed her face, the pained hunch that made her shoulders and spine collapse in towards her chest and belly way too late to stop the bullet. "What the hell _are_ you?"

She turned her head until her huge eyes found Mal, and breathed, "I'm sorry-I can't. I… can't." And without another word she turned, broke and ran.

Then everyone began to talk at once.

_Sit down, River. Please. Just sit down. Gorram it, Mal. Let her be already! Moonbrain talking craziness again-can't you shut her up? Simon-what's she mean? Shy killed someone? _Shy_? River, honey, let's just sit down again, okay?_

_A little quiet would be nice._

_So she killed someone. Who the hell hasn't? No offense, Kaylee. None taken. But _Shy_?_

"I said a little quiet would be nice!" Mal's voice, raised this time, cut through the furor like an Alliance swiftboat through deep space. Silence settled around the table. "Better," Mal nodded. Turning to Jayne, the captain fixed him with an unblinking stare. "Any light to shed here, Jayne?"

Jayne shrugged. "I got nothing."

"Then go find some. I'm weary of a show with my dinner every damn time we all sit down."

"Gorram it," Jayne muttered, slamming back his chair and standing. But truth told, he was grateful for Mal's dismissal—his last view of Shy, she'd looked positively unhinged and his gut gnawed on the fact like a hungry rat on an old dry bone.

She was his woman, after all. For a couple more days, anyhow.

Without a backward glance, he strode out of the galley.

* * *

Jayne knocked on Shy's door, but there was no answer so he pounded on it.

Finally he heard something: "Go away."

Few things Jayne knew of could make a man feel a for-certain dumbass like trying to conversate with a woman in two different rooms with a closed door in between. "Gorram it, Shy, open the rutting door."

"Not this time, pirate." _Ta me da_, but her voice had a chill in it strong as winter. "Tell the captain I'll just stay in here until Strand. Won't cause no trouble."

"Come out and tell him yourself." Jayne frowned harder, like maybe the door would open on its own if it knew he was pissed at it. "I ain't your gorram runner."

That definitely got a response. He could hear her swearing at him as her voice neared the door a split second before it was slid open so hard and fast it rattled in its frame. And sure enough, there she was on the other side of it, blood-colored hair wild and green eyes even wilder. "I'm done with this shit, Jayne," she said very distinctly. "That isn't any human child in there."

He considered that a moment and shrugged. "Well, yeah."

Shy's eyes went flat and dark at that, and damned if she didn't try to shut the door shut right there in his face. Jayne caught it before it went far; he was still bigger. "Aw, hell no."

Checking first to make sure she wasn't armed, he pushed right past her into her bunk. Glancing quick at shelf and night table to make sure both her pistols were present and accounted for, Jayne crossed his arms over his chest and sat down on her bed to wait.

By the look on her face as she stared at him from where she stood to one side of the door and vibrating with an anger he could almost smell on her, Jayne figured if she'd had a knife, it just might be stuck hilt-deep in some part of him right about now. But she didn't, so he just stared back and waited. She wasn't the only gorram one in the room had a card face, damn it, even if hers was the better.

Amazingly, Shy blinked first. Shaking her head, she slammed the door closed again. But not so hard as she'd flung it open-that was something, he supposed. Hair snapping and flying like it was mad at him too, Shy stomped over and sat down on the bed as far away as she could get from him.

"Hundan," she snarled at him.

Jayne shrugged again and gave it right back. "Huli jing."

Her eyebrows rose at that and her eyes blazed so high with green fire that Jayne dropped his gaze to watch her hands in case she swung at him or went for a gun-she looked that pissed. When she didn't do either, he figured she probably couldn't get _more_ angry so he might as well ask. He was mighty curious. "What's the moonbrain talking about, anyway? Who'd you kill that has you so befrazzled?"

The fire drained out of Shy's eyes, leaving them dark and wide, and the fight seeped right away from her too, leaving her so still and grey beneath the riot of colors painted on her that Jayne figured now he knew what she'd look like, dead. That gorram getting-familiar pain shot hard and fast through his chest.

Shy looked down at her hands a long, long while and then asked without raising her head, her voice thin and washed-out as an old scrap of curtain blowing in the busted-out window of an abandoned house, "Would you fetch that man of god for me, pirate?"

He didn't argue with her, not when she raised her eyes full of tears to him and asked again, biting her lip until it bled a little to keep her voice steady. Instead Jayne took her hand, squeezed it a long moment, and then got up to look for Shepherd Book.

* * *

It wasn't a chore to find him, as the shepherd was coming up the way towards Shy's bunk just as he was leaving it.

Jayne stopped in the middle of the way and crossed his arms over his chest, stood there looking as mean as he knew how. "What are you up to, preacher?"

Book didn't look intimidated in the least. "I wanted to see if I could be of help to her." He crossed his arms over his chest too, book in hand, and waited.

They stared each other down until Jayne glanced down at the floor between his boots. "Well, good," he muttered before looking back up into Book's face. "'Cause she wants to see you."

The shepherd's eyes grew darker, and he nodded, turned to go. But Jayne caught him by an arm and held him back. "You go easy on her, Shepherd. She's in a rough way. If you… I'll…" Jayne let the threat dangle since he had no words big enough to frame what he was trying to say.

Book measured him a long moment, and then the man smiled like he'd just got wind of a good secret. "Stand down, Jayne," his voice and eyes were kind even as he slipped his arm out of Jayne's grasp, easy as that. "I won't hurt Shy." And with that he turned and walked down the hall.

Jayne watched after him, feeling dream-blood spill out of a hole in his chest that didn't exist, and then he had an idea. Considering a moment, Jayne turned on his heel and walked away fast.

* * *

He found her tucked away in the corner of the gangway stairs above the cargo bay, apparently having a deep conversation with the ends of a handful of her hair.

"Hey, there, Little Sis," Jayne pitched his voice low, as friendly as he could, and approached with the same slow caution he'd use walking up on a fly-mad bull. "Now I know you and I ain't been the shiniest of friends, but good ol' Jayne has a question on his mind maybe you can-"

River interrupted him without looking up from the ends of her hair she was ruffling with her spare hand. "She wants to say it." She paused, and now she looked away, directly into the blank stairwell wall beside her. After a moment she turned back to Jayne. "She's saying it now."

Jayne sat down a few steps below her. "Saying what?"

"I'm not your sister." Her eyes darkened, her voice turned accusatory and rose. "We aren't related at all!" She spoke loud enough that Jayne shushed her and looked guiltily down the stairs, listening for anyone who might have heard. That's all he needed, Mal to come running, thinking something unwholesome was going on. But luckily, there were no footfalls, and River turned her attention back to her handful of hair. "No. I can't talk to him," she said to it, like she was telling a secret. "He has a hole in his chest."

With a surge of dread, Jayne looked down at himself, felt his chest but there was no wound, no blood, nothing at all; his breath left him in a rush of relief.

"Gorram moonbrain," he muttered to himself as he rose to his feet again.

It was a stupid idea anyway.


	5. Shying Away Chapter 5

"For the last time, Captain Reynolds, I can't tell you." Book's face was set in a study of resolve.

Mal's face, now, that was a study in distinct and angry unhappiness. "'Can't', preacher, or 'won't?'"

Book's eyes darkened and he crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm a shepherd. Surely you don't expect I'd violate her confidence, Mal."

"No, no, no." Mal literally threw up his hands. "See, no one's speaking of violating anyone. I just want to know what's so important River keeps bringing it up as table talk before someone takes it to that new and exciting level where someone gets dead."

Jayne looked back and forth between the two men in the cockpit with him like he was watching a fancy game of shuttlecock. He still wasn't sure why Mal had asked him to be here, but if it had to do with Shy he was damned grateful. His last glimpse of her when he'd slid the door closed between them made that pain in his chest howl like a stab wound. She'd looked like her own great-grandma sitting there on her bunk, slumped, thin, grey, unmoving. And that had been a couple handfuls of hours ago besides.

"No one is in danger, Captain Reynolds," the shepherd was saying. Then he frowned. "Except maybe Shy, herself."

"She ain't in no danger," Jayne set that record straight, maybe a little louder than he needed. "I'm watching out for her."

Mal turned his narrow-eyed attention full on him like Reaver scout-lights. "Is that what it is? Looks to me, Jayne, like you're all over each other like a pair of lizard-brained kids. Is there something more to it I'm missing?" Gorram but his eyes were sharp, stabbing at Jayne like they were.

Without taking his gaze off Jayne, Mal said to Shepherd Book, "Speaking of, can you give us a minute, Shepherd? I need a word with Jayne here."

Book's eyes moved from the captain to the mercenary and back again. A small frown creasing his brow, the shepherd nodded and walked away down the hall.

When he was gone, Mal went on as if there had been no interruption. "While we're here and talking, just what are you fixing to do about her, Jayne?" Captain Reynolds rested his hands on his hips and considered him with that frankness that always made Jayne feel like he wasn't wearing enough clothing. Or skin. "'Cause after all this cluster-kao, I figure I got some investment in Shy's outcome myself."

"Huh?" Jayne frowned.

"I mean, she seems a decent enough woman far as ex-whores go, and anyone with an eye in his head can see she has a thing for you," Mal shook his head. "While I can't possibly live long enough to come to an understanding about that, it surely ain't a thing she takes any pains to hide." Then he riveted Jayne with the sharpest side of his gaze.

"So. Are you gonna leave her there twisting in the wind thinking you'll come fetch her some day? Or will you turn her into a port-wife waiting for you to come home a couple times a year to get your cannon polished and your dirty drawers washed?" Gorram, if Mal's eyes didn't cut at him just like knives. "Or are you going to wish her well and take whatever claim you got staked on her with you when you leave?"

The questions―the whole damn issue―hit far too close to the storm churning in Jayne's own head for any possible sort of comfort or answer. Jayne looked away first, looked down at his boots, at the floor between them, at the closest hull strake. He told them gruffly, "I don't rightly know yet. It's all kinda messed up in my head."

Mal said nothing for such a long time he might have simply walked away. But when Jayne eventually looked up to see if he was still there, he was—and the captain's eyes were on him still but not quite so icy anymore.

"Ain't saying I envy you the decision, Jayne," Mal told him quietly, unsmiling but not unkindly either, "Just saying you better make it before we set down on Strand." Turning, Mal walked away and Jayne watched him recede down the hallway.

Something hit Jayne all sudden; something that made so much sense he could've slapped someone for not thinking of it sooner. He called after Mal, "Maybe she could just stay here."

Mal stopped.

Mal turned around.

Mal came back down the gangway, fast. And he was frowning.

"She set you up to this, Jayne?" Jayne could tell how pissed the captain was by how quiet and low his voice got. "'Cause that wasn't our deal."

"No!" Jayne snorted. "I thought it all myself. Just now."

The captain's frown disappeared; he barked a laugh instead, but to Jayne's ears it didn't sound particularly mirthful. "Well, then." Then the frown was back. "Let's pretend I'd actually consider taking another gorram person for crew; how's she gonna earn her board? Taking the crew's money sharking cards between jobs until someone shoots her? Humpin' you into a stupor every night until someone shoots you both?" Mal shook his head. "No. No ruttin' way, Jayne. Not in all nine hells."

Jayne tried to think fast. "She's a damn good shot, Mal. I seen her almost take a guy out blind with two men beating her down. She ain't scared of much," he recalled everything he'd seen her stare down, including Gustin's bullet and Mal himself. "And you said yourself she was good with a needle."

Mal smiled at that, but by the set of his mouth Jayne didn't believe the expression a whit. "And that'd be right useful if we were in the business of shooting folks and selling suits. But we ain't."

"Well, when _you_ went out and got yourself a wife," Jayne objected, "Bitch tried to kill us. Twice. At least mine ain't ever tried to kill any of us." He thought back and amended, "Well, except Book that one time. But that was a misunderstanding."

Mal said nothing, just looked Jayne flat in the face that way he had; again Jayne felt naked. Then the captain took a deep breath and Jayne fought a powerful urge to take a step back from whatever Mal was getting ready to say. "Shy's your gorram wife now?"

Jayne retraced the steps of what he had just said, and started to sweat. Holy gosse. Mal had himself a point there.

So he considered it, Shy being in his bed every night, the two of them blowing up things together, having someone around who didn't treat him like a complete backbirth most of the time, and he found―to his astonishment―that it might not be so bad giving it a try. Wouldn't be all that different, anyhow, from what they were doing now, except without a deadline hanging over them. It was like a window opened in his mind and he could suddenly imagine a whole slew of things that he'd never really thought he'd live long enough to think about. But mostly it meant not having to say goodbye to her hands and her laugh and her painted skin and her breathing next to his own in the darkest part of the night, ever. Jayne shrugged. "I dunno, Mal. Maybe so. Would you let her stay, if she was?"

Mal took another deep breath, and when he spoke again, this time his words were clipped short. "How 'bout this, instead. You stay on Strand with her and figure it out." The captain leaned closer to him to add, so low, so quiet, "And you throw that go tsao de huli jing Saffron up in the air between us ever again, I will shoot you deader than shit and piss on your corpse while it's still warm." He wheeled and walked away.

Jayne stood and watched Mal go; he believed every word. Then he went to look for Shy.

* * *

"It's a really, really bad idea, Cap'n, is what I think." Zoe's eyes were dark, steady on Mal's. "Jayne's bad enough alone." She shook her head. "We might as well cut our own throats now and save him the trouble if she stays. Besides―what would she do besides give Jayne an extra gun hand?"

Mal leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms over his chest. "Nothing I haven't thought of already. But she does keep him occupied and he's been less trouble, getting some on a regular schedule. And it's no secret we could use another gun hand, even if it is Jayne's. Alliance is squeezing us, and things on the rim ain't getting any friendlier; Feds and bounty hunters are getting thick as Reavers. Jayne has the right of it when he says she isn't scared of much; she sure faced me down easy enough. Has a hand with a needle, too―maybe she can help the doc."

Zoe laughed softly. "Sure, Cap'n. And the first time River walks in and says something batty, she goes berserk and someone's dead. All we know for sure is she's with Jayne, and that's enough reason to get rid of her, in my opinion."

"Thanks for the palaver, Zoe," Mal sighed and leaned away from the bulkhead.

"Anytime, Cap'n," she said.

Together they began to make their way to the cockpit.

* * *

"Hey. Are you with me, here?" Jayne raised himself on his elbows the better to look at her lying quiet beneath him. It was a confounding change, given the way Shy'd kept her mouth wickedly busy with one part of him or another ever since pulling him without a word back to his bunk after he located her in hers.

Shy blinked up at him. "What?"

"Well, hell, woman-the only difference between jerking myself and what we're doing here is where my hands are at. Your heart just don't seem in it, is all."

"Oh, pirate," she turned her head away from him and sighed-but not the good sexin' kind of sigh at all. It was the kind of sigh that sounded like warning sirens in Jayne's ears. "My heart ain't worth a shit in bed. Leave it be."

"Just don't like sexin' someone who don't seem to want to sex me back, is all. Kao-I ain't no Reaver." Jayne grumbled. "You want to try something else? There's a ladder across the way."

She smiled, but then she asked, "How 'bout you-where's your heart at?"

It made him sit back on his heels, frowning. "What?"

After a few moments' consideration of him, Shy's smile faltered. Then it turned into something else entirely, something sassy and dirty. "Never mind." She slid fluidly from beneath him and rose to her knees, lowering her head to the part of him that was still wondering what had happened all of a sudden.

It was no trouble at all to just close his eyes, let his head fall back and forget everything but how her mouth felt on him right there, moving, moving. So it was a damn crying shame that Jayne had to bury his hands in her hair and pull her head away from what she was working so well at. "How come you always get all over me when you got something to say you don't want to say?"

It was important, gorram it. He said so to himself over and over, trying not to look at her flushed face, her full lips, the heat back in her eyes where it belonged; trying not to think about how easy it would be, how willing she was, to just let go and forget about it.

Her eyes, turned up to his, darkened a little. "Haven't heard you complaining, pirate."

"'Cause I ain't complaining. Just want to know, is all."

She sat up abruptly and swore at him, pulled her hair out of his grasp hard enough to leave several long glossy strands of dark red caught between his fingers. When their eyes met again Shy set her jaw hard. "Maybe I should just go."

Jayne ran his hand over his face, wondering how they'd gone so quick from some half-assed rutting to her fixing to flounce out of his bunk entirely. "What the hell for?"

Shy moved away to perch on the edge of his bed furthest from him, drawing up her knees and circling them with her arms. "It's my last night here. Didn't conjure spending it arguing with you." Her voice was hard and there was an edge to it that took Jayne a few moments to place. Govanne. Ai yesu, he hadn't heard that edge since Govanne, since she stared into the eye of Gustin's gun without blinking. "Shit. For arguing, I could go find that mad girl."

Jayne snorted and rolled his eyes. "There's a mighty plan-tangle with Crazy your last night aship till she up and kills you with her gorram brain. That's way better than rolling a man who's all kinds of willing and able. Hell-you're the one went all someplace else here, not me."

She made no reply, no move. Somehow, even though he was sitting there staring at the painted pictures on her back close enough to touch, it suddenly felt like he was sitting in his bunk all alone. Jayne clenched his teeth on a few words he figured wouldn't help the situation any, and leaned over to take her by the arm instead. "Hey. I'm talking at you."

Gorram, she could move fast; he shouldn't have forgotten that. Luckily the punch Shy threw at him with her fisted free hand only grazed Jayne's jaw as he dodged, and her momentum made it an easy enough matter to shove her over on her back onto the tangled bedclothes. Then, before she could kick him, too, he straddled her to keep her feet still under him and pinned her hands with his own.

Shy went rigid as a bulkhead strake beneath him and hissed, "This how you want me now, pirate? Shiny." Her eyes gleamed with bright fury. "You want me to fight, or just lie here all scared-like?" She bared her teeth and spat a harsh laugh through them. "I can play dead, too, if that floats your barge."

Jayne frowned, uncomprehending for a moment, and then he clambered off her with a disgusted curse. "Kao, woman. What the hell's the matter with you? That's just... That's _wrong_."

She sprang to sit up. Jayne watched her warily, but Shy didn't seem inclined to try and hit him again. Instead, she just turned away and said softly, "Everything about me is wrong." Shy ducked her head so her hair fell to curtain her face from him. "Haven't you been paying attention?"

"Hell no. I've been paying attention to _you_, gorram it!" It came from him rougher than maybe it had to, but Jayne didn't care. Not when it was something he meant no matter how it got said.

Damned if she didn't flinch at that, just like he'd reached over and smacked her a good one. Her shoulders slumped, and she ducked her head even farther so all he could see was her bare colored pictures and a long fall of gleaming blood red. It looked to Jayne like maybe she was trying to crawl behind her own hair and disappear.

He sighed heavily. This sure wasn't how he'd imagined this night going. Not at all. And because he didn't know what else to do and he sure as hell wasn't going to up and leave his own damn bunk, he sat there in the silence.

"What will I do without you?"

The words came to him so quietly, so softly, Jayne wouldn't have recognized them for hers if he hadn't been sitting right there. Even so, he frowned and asked, just to be sure he'd heard 'em true, "Huh?"

One of her hands appeared from beneath those strands of hair and came to rest light as a sparrow on his thigh. "What will I do without you, Jayne?" She said it again, but even quieter this time.

Jayne was listening hard, though, and heard her just fine-and it still didn't make no sense at all. He frowned harder. "Well, anything you want, woman. What kind of crazy-ass question is that? Gorram, you're a confounding one."

She muttered something else and this Jayne was sure he hadn't heard right.

He couldn't have.

Nobody talked to Jayne Cobb that way. _Nobody._

"What did you say?" He growled the question low.

It was silent for so long Jayne was pretty sure he'd just thought he'd heard something made out of air. But then it came again, quiet.

"I said I've real been happy here. With you."

Yeah. That's what he thought she'd said. And there were so many things wrong with it that Jayne had to take a moment to sort them out. It threw him for a reel, that's for sure. Someplace in his chest, the pain thundered like a gunshot.

With all the wariness he'd use coming up on an ambush, Jayne weighed the risks, the variables, the danger, his options. As warily as he'd pick up a live grenade if he had to, Jayne reached out and turned her face up to look at him, brushing her hair back with his other hand. Beneath all that gleaming red, her eyes were wide and dark and brimful of tears.

He considered her face very carefully, ready to throw down. Or cut and run, if he had to. "What-you in love with me or some damn thing?" Jayne teased, but the words were dry in his mouth as dust, and they tasted bad. He snorted a laugh anyway and let go of her.

But Shy didn't laugh with him like she was supposed to. She just turned her face away.

Feeling suddenly all too close to the crumbling edge of a long harsh drop, Jayne turned away from her, too, any lingering good humor wiped clean out of him. Whores didn't love nobody, not even the painted arm-wrestling variety, likely; whores loved cash money is all-that and how what they got to trade for it makes men all twitchy and fall all over themselves like damn fools, thinking with their man-parts. Whatever she was going to say next, if she even answered him at all, was a deep crock, he bet himself.

But when Shy finally spoke, every sense of his turned to hear her answer in a way that pissed Jayne off and made him feel twelve years old again. "What's a whore know about love?"

She sat perfectly still even though Jayne suddenly wanted more than anything, more than a good romp, more than a fresh bottle of good hooch and a rare beefsteak the size of a buggy wheel, almost more than his next gorram breath, for her to reach out and touch him. Anywhere, just so he knew she still wanted to, was still willing to. Just so he could feel her across the space that suddenly opened up between them in his head.

It roared, that space, and it was cold and dark as The Black.

Shy sat perfectly still and wept. Tears ran down her face and dripped off her chin onto her breasts and her arms folded in her lap; the pictures they wetted turned bright, livid.

She sat perfectly still as Jayne finally slammed the door shut on that roaring cold one last time and reached for her, as Jayne gathered her into his arms, pulled her insistently against him and held her there. He waited for her to fight, to yell at him, but she remained cold and stiff as a day-old corpse.

Something occurred to him then, something so important it needed pointing out. Jayne's voice was quiet in the silence so cold he half expected his words to make clouds of steam. "But you ain't a whore any more, Shy."

Shy jumped a little, startled by the sound of his voice maybe, or by the words themselves. "What am I, then, Jayne?" Even at a whisper, her voice broke, and then she was weeping even harder. "What am I now?"

Laying her head down against his chest, Shy's sobs took her, consumed her and wracked her so violently it was painful to watch, to hold her. She made wounded animal sounds against Jayne's skin while he awkwardly rubbed her shoulders, her back; while he laid his cheek against her hair and murmured, "Don't, now. It don't matter none. Shhhh. It just don't matter," while the pain in his chest howled something Jayne had no words for.

Finally, though, finally she softened, became warm and pliable beneath his arms, hands, once again. And when she did, Jayne turned her tearstained face up to his and lowered his head to find her mouth with his own. She tried to draw away at first, her eyes open and wide with surprise on him, but only for a moment. Then she threw her arms around him and kissed him back.

He tried to go slow, since she was so sad and he'd made such a thing about not kissing on the mouth all this whole time. But how was he to know she tasted like apples, like cinnamon and cloves? How was he to know that once he tasted her, exchanged breaths with her, everything would make sense and get said all easy without any stupid fumbling for words that never worked right anyway? Something long-sleeping woke in him, hungry, when she closed her fingers in his hair and bent beneath him. Jayne tasted tears and felt her mouth fashion a smile against his own for a moment, and it all made sense.

It all made sense.

Much later on, when they were as sated as two people could get without dying from it, Jayne leaned over her on an elbow, head propped in his hand, and watched Shy's chest rise, fall, rise, fall with her even sleep-breaths until he was certain she was as deep into sleep as he'd been into her a little while ago. Then, and only then, did he lean over and say quietly into her ear, "You're my woman. That's what you are."

She did not stir.


End file.
